US grants Nvidia AI chip licenses for UAE under May pact

The United States has granted export licenses enabling Nvidia to ship billions of dollars worth of advanced artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates under a bilateral AI agreement reached in May, U.S. officials said. The approvals, issued by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, implement terms of the pact that allows the UAE to import up to 500,000 of Nvidia’s top processors annually beginning in 2025 while committing the Gulf state to matching, on a dollar for dollar basis, equivalent investment in the United States.

Under the May agreement, which followed a presidential visit to the region, the UAE pledged roughly $1.4 trillion in U.S. investments over the next decade tied to the chip shipments. A U.S. official said the recent license approvals came after Emirati authorities submitted concrete plans for reciprocal investment on American soil, although the official did not disclose the precise dollar value of the initial chip shipments or the investments approved.

The initial permit set does not include chips destined for G42, an Abu Dhabi-based, state-backed AI firm that is developing a five-gigawatt data center where U.S. cloud providers...