AI Daily: White House weighs large chip sale to Emirati AI firm G42

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

NVIDIA CHIPS: The Trump administration is weighing a deal that would allow the United Arab Emirates to import more than a million advanced Nvidia (NVDA) chips, Mackenzie Hawkins, Jenny Leonard and Ben Bartenstein of Bloomberg report, citing people familiar with the matter. The deal, which is still being negotiated, would let the UAE import 500,000 of the most advanced chips on the market each year from now to 2027, sources told Bloomberg. One-fifth would be set aside for the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, while the remainder would go to U.S. companies building data centers in the nation, according to the people.

LARGE CHIP SALE: The White House is weighing a deal that could send hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made AI chips to G42, an Emirati AI company that the U.S. has scrutinized previously for its links to China, the New York Times’ Ana Swanson and Tripp Mickle reported last night, citing three people familiar with the discussions. Under a previous agreement to sell chips to G42 in 2024, Microsoft (MSFT) managed the chips to train and develop AI models, and G42 had permission to sell Microsoft services using those semiconductors, the authors say. In addition, the Trump administration is expected to announce an agreement this week with officials in Saudi Arabia, in a deal that would give the Saudi government and its AI company Humain access to tens of thousands of chips and tech support from Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD), the authors note.

Meanwhile this morning, HUMAIN announced a strategic partnership with Nvidia to drive the next wave of artificial intelligence development. The two organizations will leverage Nvidia platforms and expertise to establish Saudi Arabia as a global leader in AI, GPU cloud computing and digital transformation to drive innovation and growth worldwide. The partnership underscores HUMAIN’s mission to position Saudi Arabia as an international AI powerhouse. HUMAIN is making a major investment to build AI factories in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts powered by several hundred thousand of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs over the next five years. The first phase of deployment will be an 18,000 NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer with Nvidia InfiniBand networking. These hyperscale AI data centers will provide a secure foundational infrastructure for training and deploying sovereign AI models at scale, enabling industries across Saudi Arabia and worldwide to accelerate innovation and digital transformation. HUMAIN will deploy the Nvidia Omniverse platform as a multi-tenant system to drive acceleration of the new era of physical AI and robotics through simulation, optimization and operation of physical environments by new human-AI-led solutions. This will allow industries such as manufacturing, logistics and energy to create fully integrated digital twins, boosting efficiency, safety and sustainability while fast-tracking the Kingdom’s journey toward Industry 4.0.

AMD and HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s new AI enterprise, also announced an agreement to build “the world’s most open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure, that will power the future of global intelligence through a network of AMD-based AI computing centers stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States.” As part of the agreement, the parties will invest up to $10B to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years. The AI superstructure built by AMD and HUMAIN will be open by design, accessible at scale, and optimized to power AI workloads across enterprise, start-up and sovereign markets. HUMAIN will oversee end-to-end delivery, including hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects, and AMD will provide the full spectrum of the AMD AI compute portfolio and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem. “At AMD, we have a bold vision to enable the future of AI everywhere – bringing open, high-performance computing to every developer, AI start-up and enterprise around the world,” said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD. “Our investment with HUMAIN is a significant milestone in advancing global AI infrastructure. Together, we are building a globally significant AI platform that delivers performance, openness and reach at unprecedented levels.”

Additionally, Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com (AMZN) company, and HUMAIN announced plans to invest $5B-plus in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in the Kingdom. This AI Zone will bring together multiple innovative capabilities, including dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers with world-class semiconductors, UltraCluster networks for faster AI training and inference, AWS services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as Amazon Q. “We thank AWS for doubling down on their long-term partnership with the Kingdom. This new collaboration with HUMAIN lays the foundation for the intelligent era, accelerates our innovation momentum, grows our talent, and reinforces Saudi Arabia’s position as a global partner of choice in the age of AI,” said His Excellency Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

On Tuesday, Cisco (CSCO) also announced a series of strategic initiatives across all phases of the AI revolution in the United States and in the Middle East region. These new initiatives place Cisco at the center of the AI revolution in the Gulf, providing world class and trusted technology together with other Cisco partners, the company said. The announcements this morning follow the visit last week by CEO Chuck Robbins to Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, and the visit today by Jeetu Patel, EVP and Chief Product Officer, to Saudi Arabia, where he is participating in President Trump’s state visit to the region. Cisco said it will collaborate with the AI Infrastructure Partnership, which is led by BlackRock (BLK), Global Infrastructure Partners, MGX, Microsoft, Nvidia and xAI. AIP will initially seek to unlock $30B in capital from investors, asset owners, and corporations. Cisco’s addition as a technology partner to AIP, further strengthens the AIP platform as it seeks to invest in secure, efficient and scalable infrastructure to support AI workloads. Cisco also has announced to join a groundbreaking initiative with HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s new AI enterprise to help build the world’s most open, scalable, resilient and cost-efficient AI infrastructure. Additionally, Cisco will extend strategic partnership with G42 to further advance AI innovation and infrastructure development in the UAE. The collaboration focuses on Cisco’s comprehensive secure AI portfolio and AI-native solutions and services and G42’s deep regional roots, AI infrastructure expertise, and expanding global footprint including a potential joint Go-To-Market initiative. Qatar’s Ministry of Interior and Cisco signed a letter of intent to collaborate on Qatar’s digital transformation, AI, infrastructure development and cybersecurity.

BUY COREWEAVE: Northland initiated coverage of CoreWeave (CRWV) with an Outperform rating and $80 price target. The company’s brand is already established as the performance at scale leader for training and inferencing, the firm tells investors in a research note. Northland “strongly” believes CoreWeave has established itself as the leader in training artificial intelligence as a service infrastructure base. The firm believes the company is also “differentiated” at the inferencing stage of AI workloads. It thinks CoreWeave will achieve 10% AIaaS market share in 2025 and be able to sustain the 10% market share.