President Trump is in a good spot.
Amid the worldwide race to dominate synthetic intelligence (AI), Trump is dealing with rising stress to withhold rising American expertise from overseas adversaries whereas ensuring U.S. chipmakers dominate the worldwide stage.
Trump’s tech coverage was a precedence of his go to final week to the Center East, the place he signed a slew of multibillion-dollar AI offers between U.S. firms and Gulf international locations.
Whereas the White Home argued the funding will improve U.S. expertise firms’ international footprint, the thought of promoting American-made AI chips to Gulf international locations additionally raised safety considerations again within the U.S.
“The Trump administration is trying to walk a geopolitical tightrope,” rising tech and geopolitical researcher Tobias Feakin advised The Hill.
“It wants to contain China’s AI ambitions without choking off the global reach of its own tech champions,” Feakin added. “That’s an increasingly difficult balance to maintain in a world where supply chains, research ecosystems, and compute infrastructure are transnational by design.”
Gulf offers draw scrutiny
The backlash is highlighting the dilemma the White Home faces in balancing innovation and nationwide safety.
AI chips are a crucial element to the AI race, serving as the facility for AI expertise. The AI chips are particularly designed to satisfy the excessive calls for of AI features, which isn’t potential with conventional chips.
Washington is more and more involved with China getting its fingers on American tech, together with if it comes by way of third-party offers. In response to these fears, each the Biden and Trump administrations have tightened export controls on superior chips.
Fears ramped up amongst lawmakers and authorities officers earlier this yr following the discharge of Chinese language AI startup DeepSeek’s new, high-performing fashions, which the agency claims have been constructed on the fraction of the worth of U.S. fashions.
Stories have circulated of U.S.-made chips being smuggled into China regardless of the tightened export controls.
Republican Rep. John Moolenaar (Mich.), the chair of the Home Choose Committee on China, mentioned any AI deal wants “scrutiny and verifiable guardrails.” He expressed considerations with offers into consideration between the Trump administration and Abu-Dhabi based mostly agency G42, which has reported ties to China.
Beneath a brand new settlement between the United Arab Emirates and the U.S., G42 will construct a large 5G information heart in Abu Dhabi that’s anticipated to be the most important AI campus outdoors america.
“The U.S. must lead the world in AI technology—but we must do it securely,” Moolenaar wrote on X. “The CCP is actively seeking indirect access to our top tech.”
“We raised concerns about G42 last year for this very reason – and we need safeguards in place before more agreements move forward,” he added.
Whereas China has developed a lot nearer financial ties to Persian Gulf international locations, geopolitical specialists observe they don’t examine to China’s relations with U.S. adversaries like Iran and North Korea.
“It’s a little more of a soft issue of would there be more opportunities for either individual companies or actors that could see a benefit in starting to sell chips or components… to China that violate U.S. export controls?” mentioned Alison Szalwinski, vp of The Asia Group.
When requested in regards to the scrutiny over the offers, a White Home spokesperson mentioned the settlement will “help ensure the global AI ecosystem will be built with American chips and use American models.”
“The agreement also contains historic commitments by the UAE to further align their national security regulations with the United States, including strong protections to prevent the diversion of U.S.-origin technology,” White Home spokesperson Anna Kelly wrote in an announcement.
Administration, tech leaders dismiss considerations
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tried to quell considerations in regards to the take care of G42, stating the settlement has “strong security guarantees” to forestall the diversion of U.S. expertise to overseas adversaries.
David Sacks, the White Home’s crypto and AI czar, fiercely pushed again towards the criticism, writing on X, “The only question you need to ask is: does China wish it had made these deals? Yes of course it does.”
“But President Trump got there first and beat them to the punch,” Sacks added.
Leaders of the nation’s largest expertise companies are lining up behind the offers, which stand to carry their non-public firms extra cash and stretch their international footprint.
In a repost of Sacks’s remarks, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned “this was an extremely smart thing for you all to do and I’m sorry people are giving you grief.”
Altman was among the many varied expertise leaders on the White Home journey, and Bloomberg reported OpenAI is predicted to assist develop the 5G information heart.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who additionally attended the journey, additionally dismissed considerations about diversion over the weekend. Nvidia makes a number of the world’s hottest laptop chips powering the AI race and is the second-largest publicly traded U.S. firm.
“There’s no evidence of any AI chip diversion. … These are massive systems. The Grace Blackwell system is nearly two tons, and so you’re not going to be putting that in your pocket or your backpack anytime soon,” he advised reporters, referring to Nvidia’s newest AI computing platform.
“The important thing is that the countries and the companies that we sell to recognize that diversion is not allowed, and everybody would like to continue to buy Nvidia technology. And so they monitor themselves, carefully,” Huang added.
Through the journey, Huang introduced Nvidia’s plans to promote greater than 18,000 of its AI Blackwell to Saudi Arabia-based Humain to assist energy a knowledge heart challenge.
Nvidia noticed its inventory soar 16 p.c final week, giving the chip producer some aid because it navigates export controls. The corporate mentioned final month the Trump administration’s latest tightening of export controls on laptop chips will price the corporate $5.5 billion.
Push for AI dominance
Days forward of the Center East journey, the Commerce Division strengthened the administration’s pro-innovation stance when it reversed a Biden-era rule that might have positioned caps on AI chips gross sales to all however 18 international locations around the globe. The rule “stifled American innovation,” the federal company mentioned, hinting a alternative rule could be issued.
Many tech firms — from Nvidia to Microsoft — and tech coverage specialists agreed the rule was overreaching and threatened the U.S.’s means to compete on a world scale.
“It was too complicated, convoluted. It was too bureaucratic. It would have required a lot of effort on the part of us, agencies who just didn’t have the resources to implement this thing and in an expedient manner,” mentioned Matt Mittelsteadt, a expertise coverage analysis fellow on the Libertarian assume tank Cato Institute.
“China … if this rule was to be enforced, would have had a much freer hand to compete globally than American industries,” he added.
The Bureau of Trade and Safety tried to strike a steadiness in its rule rescission and issued new steering, stating the usage of Huawei Ascend chips wherever on this planet violates U.S. export controls. Huawei has shut ties to the Chinese language Communist Celebration.
AI ‘bargaining’ chips
The Gulf offers underscore the Trump administration’s leveraging of AI infrastructure like chips and information heart investments in bilateral agreements.
Whereas these offers weren’t instantly associated to Trump’s commerce warfare negotiations, specialists recommended the administration might use the technique in different tariff talks.
“They could want to use those as leverage to extract concessions from countries they might be negotiating with,” mentioned Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow on the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace.
“And that could be tariffs reductions. You could link it to anything, and this administration generally really likes using leverage,” added Winter-Levy, whose analysis focuses on the intersection of nationwide safety and AI.
Because the White Home prepares to barter tariffs with varied allied nations, expertise observers are involved guardrails shall be ignored.
“And if you want to do this with dozens of countries at once,” Winter-Levy mentioned, the federal government “does not have the capacity” to take action effectively.
The U.S. might by chance find yourself “turning off exports altogether or giving away a core strategic technology in exchange for concessions that may look good, but are actually not worth all that much,” he added.
The coverage might backfire in the long term, specialists warned.
“It could end up creating a race to the bottom, where every AI company faces pressure to move to the Gulf to compete, and you end up offshoring a key strategic technology away from the United States to a group of countries whose interests do not always align with ours,” Winter-Levy mentioned.
“It’s definitely a concern that’s animating countries to look elsewhere. And where are they looking? China. And China, because of the US restrictions on exports to China itself, it needs alternatives,” Daniel Castro, vp on the Info Know-how and Innovation Basis, advised The Hill.
