U.S. Unveils Sweeping A.I. Project in Abu Dhabi

President Trump signed deals to create a 10-mile campus that would transform the United Arab Emirates into an A.I. powerhouse

The United States and the United Arab Emirates have signed an agreement that will help vault the Gulf country to become a rising power in artificial intelligence.

The announcement came as President Trump visited a new A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi on Thursday, a site that will be supplied by American-made A.I. chips and constitute the largest such project outside of the United States.

The campus is part of a planned artificial intelligence project that will be supported by 5 gigawatts of electrical power and built by the Emirati A.I. company G42, in partnership with several U.S. companies. Mr. Trump and Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the president of the U.A.E., attended the unveiling.

The Trump administration said the project would build on an agreement between the countries called the “U.S.-U.A.E. A.I. Acceleration Partnership” that would deepen their collaboration on A.I.

Artificial intelligence chips, which are made by American companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, are highly coveted by governments globally. The administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. established a framework in its final weeks for how many of these chips certain countries can buy, a decision that rankled many tech firms. The Trump administration threw that rule out and is instead intending to strike deals with individual governments to determine how many American chips they can obtain. The U.A.E. now appears to be the first country to finalize such an agreement.

That flow of chips will help supply the massive A.I. campus in Abu Dhabi, which is expected to span 10 miles. The project will help American A.I. companies to serve customers who live within 2,000 miles of the site, the Trump administration said.

Lennart Heim, an A.I. expert at the RAND Corporation, wrote on X that the campus would be “bigger than all other major AI infrastructure announcements we’ve seen so far,” including those in the United States.

Some critics have expressed concern about the deals, saying that, while the Gulf States have plenty of cash and energy necessary for building A.I. data centers, they may not prove to be the most reliable partners in the long run. The U.A.E. has an authoritarian government and maintains close ties to China. Many experts consider A.I. to be a transformative and sensitive technology, since it has broad implications for economic as well as military power.

As details of Middle East chip deals filtered back to Washington in recent days, current and former U.S. officials have expressed concerns that the deals may have inadequate protections to prevent the technology from benefiting China, or that they could mean that the world’s biggest data centers sit in the Middle East at the end of the decade, instead of the United States.

The announcement Thursday, which was put out by the Commerce Department, said the U.A.E. was “committed to safeguarding advanced A.I. technologies by implementing stringent measures to prevent diversion and ensure controlled access to technology.”

Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said the agreement opened a “historic Middle Eastern partnership on A.I. between our two nations.”

“By extending the world’s leading American tech stack to an important strategic partner in the region, this agreement is a major milestone in achieving President Trump’s vision for U.S. A.I. dominance,” he said.