About a year ago, Trump touched down in Riyadh, shook hands with MBS, and walked away with a $600 billion Saudi investment pledge. Jensen Huang stood on the same stage and announced that 18,000 Nvidia GB300 Blackwell GPUs were heading to HUMAIN, a brand-new company owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PIF. The press framed it as a technology diplomacy story, butbut only partially.

Right now, those data centers in Riyadh and Dammam, each pulling up to 100MW, are being built. Across the Gulf, the G42 and OpenAI-led Stargate UAE cluster in Abu Dhabi is tracking its own 200MW first phase this year on a 1