US tech giant Nvidia has recently announced plans to expand in the Middle East. The chipmaker has indicated that it is seeking to move beyond its current model of partnering with other big tech firms, and will instead pivot towards doing business with commercial and public organisations in the Gulf.

This move was partly sparked by Donald Trump’s visit to the Gulf last week. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, alongside other tech bosses such as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, joined the President on his trip, using the opportunity to announce a flurry of deals with partners in the Middle East.

For one, the UAE is expected to be permitted to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips each year. This is part of a broader forging of tech ties between America and the Gulf State, with Trump also agreeing to help build the largest AI campus outside of the US in Abu Dhabi.

What’s more, the trip confirmed that Nvidia is set to export hundreds of thousands of advanced semiconductors to Saudi Arabia, starting with an imminent sale of 18,000 chips to Humain, a startup launched by Riyadh’s sovereign wealth fund. Other US corporations, such as Cisco, also announced multi-billion-dollar deals with the UAE and elsewhere in the Gulf. This represents a major shift in policy, considering that the Biden administration restricted the export of chips to the Middle East in 2023, mainly over concerns that they could end up in Chinese hands.

So what explains this change? These deals have been driven, at least in part, by sheer commercial interest: the Trump administration has claimed that Qatar committed $1.2 trillion to US companies, with Saudi Arabia pledging a further $600 billion and the UAE $200 billion. As the White House press release put it, the US President is “never tired of winning.”

Unsurprisingly, these announcements have had an immediate impact on financial markets, with Nvidia’s share price rising by more than 20% since the start of this month alone. Amazon — whose CEO Andy Jassy was also part of Trump’s delegation in the Gulf — similarly saw its share price rise by more than 10% in the aftermath of the trip.

This was particularly welcome news for the President given US stock markets, which are increasingly dominated by a handful of tech mega-corporations, had been roiled earlier this year. While the Gulf visit has seen the Nasdaq recover most of its 2025 losses, prior to the trip it had shed almost 20% of its value.

A significant factor in this was the release in January of a new model from Chinese AI platform DeepSeek, which was trained at a cost of just $6 million in comparison to the more than $100 million OpenAI spent producing ChatGPT-4. Nvidia shed almost $600 billion in market value during trading the following Monday, the biggest single-day loss in US history. This reflected market fears that American firms could be massively undercut by Chinese companies, which also appeared to be operating more sophisticated models than many had previously thought.

For a president who has previously put great significance on dealmaking as a reflection of his performance, Trump’s political motives for bolstering the strength of companies such as Nvidia by opening new global markets are obvious. More profoundly, though, it seems the US is dropping its previous aversion to chip exports to the Middle East in order to counter the growing influence of China in the region. Beijing remains the largest trading partner for Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and is ready and willing to collaborate with the Gulf on crucial technologies such as AI.

Rather than continuing to leave a void for China to fill in this strategically critical region — and, in doing so, locking US companies out of trillions of dollars’ worth of contracts — Trump has calculated that it is time for the US to reassert itself as the Gulf’s preferred provider of technology. By relaxing the restrictions he inherited from Biden, he is crafting new economic and geopolitical leverage.

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Harry Clynch is a journalist based in London, mainly covering global financial markets and international affairs. He is the Features Editor for Disruption Banking, and has also written for The Spectator.

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