The Trump administration and the United Arab Emirates are partnering to build a massive data center in Abu Dhabi that is expected to be the largest artificial intelligence campus outside the United States.
The AI campus, unveiled during President Trump’s visit to the UAE, will have 5 gigawatts of capacity and will eventually stretch across 10 square miles, the Commerce Department announced Thursday.
The data center at Qasr Al Watan will serve as a regional platform for U.S. hyperscalers, which are technology companies that provide cloud computing and data management services. These companies will be able to offer low-latency services to nearly half of the global population resigning within 2,000 miles of the UAE, the Commerce Department.
“In the UAE, American companies will operate the data centers and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a statement Thursday. “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. AI dominance.”
It is one of a flurry of AI-related deals the Trump administration signed this week with the Gulf states. The Trump administration has made American AI dominance a key goal of its technology policy, though some have concerns these deals sidestepped national security concerns.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) slammed Trump’s support for deals to sell advanced U.S. chip technology to Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Thursday.
Schumer said Trump would “greenlight the sale of the most sensitive U.S. chip technology in exchange for vague promises of more foreign investment.”
“This deal could very well be dangerous because we have no clarity on how the Saudis and Emiratis will prevent the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, the Chinese manufacturing establishment from getting their hands on these chips,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.
Lutnick noted the data center agreement includes “strong security guarantees” to avoid U.S. technology being diverted from their intended locations.
Reports of smuggled U.S.-made chips into China have prompted growing concerns in recent months that U.S. technology is inadvertently ending up in the hands of foreign actors.
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday that would require AI chips to have location verification services and mandate chip exporters to report if the technology was diverted. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), one of the Senate’s fiercest China hawks, introduced a similar bill last week.
The White House said Thursday the U.S. and UAE also signed an AI agreement to support the $1.4 trillion “investment framework,” which was first announced in March. As part of the deal, the UAE committed to investing, building or financing U.S. data centers “that are at least as large and as powerful as those in the UAE.”
The White House emphasized the UAE also committed to further aligning its national security regulations with the United States, including protections against the diversion of U.S. technology.
