DUBAI, United Arab Emirates Deep in the oil-rich deserts of the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates is on a mission to establish supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence.

Seven thousand miles across the planet, the United States, led by President Donald Trump, wants American firms to dominate the global AI race.

While their goals may be separated by continents, their ambitions are strikingly aligned.

The U.S. currently makes the world's most advanced semiconductor chips, while the UAE and neighboring Gulf countries have the abundant, cheap energy needed to power enormous AI data centers. The two countries have been allies for half a century, and Abu Dhabi embraced Trump during the U.S. president's visit this month with unprecedented fanfare and investment pledges, many of which focused on tech and AI.

In the eyes of many investors, financial leaders, and political powers players from Silicon Valley and Washington to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the two countries' ever-strengthening AI alliance to which hundreds of billions of dollars have already been committed is a match made in heaven.

"Energy‑rich Gulf nations join the roster of trusted partners just as U.S. data‑center grids hit their physical limits," Myron Xie, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, told CNBC.

At the same time, "the UAE gains access to advanced compute and talent, helping it pursue its own sovereign AI goals," Xie said. "The Middle East, flush with cheap energy and capital, is poised to become the next regional AI hub."

In the UAE, the developments are part of a long-term strategy by the Gulf sheikhdom to position itself as a global leader in AI. This, the country's leadership holds, will enhance its geopolitical influence, diversify its economy beyond crude oil dependency, and assert itself as a technological powerhouse.

The goal for Washington is clear: to ensure American companies lead the global AI race with China and spread American tech around the world.

Trump's Middle East visit in mid-May — which featured stops in Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi — saw the announcement of over $200 billion in commercial deals between the U.S. and the UAE. This brought the total of investment agreements in the Gulf region, including those from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to over $2 trillion.

As part of the Abu Dhabi deals, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco Systems announced that they will help build Stargate UAE AI campus launching in 2026. The Stargate Project is a $500 billion private sector AI-focused investment vehicle, announced by OpenAI in January in partnership with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX and Japan's SoftBank.

The companies said an initial 200-megawatt AI cluster should launch in Abu Dhabi next year. And the AI campus deal means the UAE gets access to many of Nvidia's latest chips, American technology and software.

It's the kind of agreement that would have faced restrictions under the previous U.S. administration, but Trump has looked to change the way is approaching tech export restrictions.

His administration plans to rescind a Biden era "AI diffusion rule," which imposed strict export controls on advanced AI chips even to U.S.-friendly nations. that doing away with these limits could open the door for the sensitive American technology to end up in the hands of rivals like China  a topic of ongoing debate among U.S. lawmakers and security professionals.

Source: CNBC