A $5 billion US-UAE data center agreement in Abu Dhabi is defended by Trump's AI envoy despite Senate opposition due to tech leaks to China.

In an effort to enhance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have partnered to construct a gigantic data center complex in Abu Dhabi with a capacity of five gigawatts. According to the Commerce Department, the deal, which was revealed during US President Donald Trump's recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, will be the biggest data center deployment outside of the US. In order to better serve the global south, the initiative is also anticipated to increase the presence of American cloud and AI firms in the Middle East.

But according to reports, a few influential Senate Democrats have pushed the Trump administration to reexamine recent agreements on artificial intelligence with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These Democrats claim that increased sales of AI chips to Middle Eastern nations run the danger of revealing advanced technology to China and Russia and may also restrict supply for US businesses, according to a Bloomberg story. By the way, since 2023, the United States has limited its sales of sophisticated AI semiconductors to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This is part of a larger initiative to stop China from using middlemen to obtain American technology that is prohibited.

Now, David O. Sacks, the "White House AI and Crypto Czar," a recently appointed position tasked with creating a legal framework for the cryptocurrency sector, defended Trump's AI data center cooperation with the United Arab Emirates in a lengthy statement on Twitter. He added that Advantage China, which has been more than happy to provide the UAE the Huawei+DeepSeek tech stack, will win this transaction if the US does not accept it.