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Donald Trump brought a host of new national security issues with him when he returned from his trip to the Middle East.
His plan to accept a $400 million jet as a gift from the Qatari government to use as his presidential plane has already been denounced by lawmakers — not just because it’s ripe for corruption, but also because ensuring it isn’t rigged with any kind of malicious devices would be such a massive undertaking as to make security officials’ heads spin.
Now, concerns are cropping up around the president’s deals on artificial intelligence with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and their implications for American security.
The Trump team has worked out agreements for parties in Saudi Arabia to acquire tens of thousands of semiconductors from Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., while shipments to the United Arab Emirates could top a million accelerators — mostly for projects involving or owned by US companies. Such chips are used to develop and train models that can mimic human intelligence, and they’re the most coveted technology of the AI age.
Bloomberg reports that although the Saudi and UAE agreements “include high-level language barring Chinese firms from accessing those chips,” some officials in the Trump administration are trying to slow the completion of the deals out of concern that “too many details are still unresolved and the deals shouldn’t be announced without legally binding provisions.”
Those officials are not alone.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the reported semiconductor deal, citing security concerns. And the Republican-launched House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party also raised concerns about Trump’s massive sale of chips to the Middle East and his broader AI agreements in the region, like his plan to partner with the United Arab Emirates on building the world’s largest data center outside the U.S., in Abu Dhabi.
“Reports of new U.S. chip deals with Gulf nations—without a new chip rule in place—present a vulnerability for the CCP to exploit,” began the committee’s thread on X, before going on to mention the data center deal.
Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment focused on tech and national security, suggested to Time magazine that security concerns shouldn’t be limited to China, since U.S. tech companies’ rush to do business in the Middle East could give all sorts of countries more influence.
“You could end up in a position where some large proportion of U.S. computing power has been offshored to a bunch of states that can wield leverage over U.S. foreign policy to shape it in ways that may not align with US national interests,” he said.
What stands out is his observation that these moves go against Trump’s self-described “America First” agenda. Per Time’s report:
‘This is offshoring data centers that could be built in the United States. This is offshoring chips that could be going to US tech companies,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to reconcile this with an America First approach to industrial policy or economic policy in general.’
The report explains how the Trump administration “ripped up” the Biden administration’s restrictions on the export of semiconductors to foreign nations like China and some in the Middle East. That move was designed to give the U.S. a competitive advantage in the AI race and to concentrate semiconductors domestically, but the Trump administration has argued the rules were “overly complex” and “would stymie American innovation,” and that lowering them aids Trump’s trade wars by helping him secure concessions from international partners.
However, the Trump administration’s rush to secure business deals with these partners — apparently without consideration for the risks to U.S. national interests — has plenty of people sweating.
Meanwhile, the Trump family’s lucrative business dealings in the region certainly aren’t alleviating concerns that these AI arrangements have not been made solely with Americans’ interests in mind.