Microsoft said Monday it will be shipping Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates as part of a deal approved by the U.S. Commerce Department.
The Redmond, Washington software giant said licenses approved in September under “stringent” safeguards enable it to ship more than 60,000 Nvidia chips, including the California chipmaker’s advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips, for use in data centers in the Middle Eastern country.
The agreement appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s remarks in a “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday that such chips would not be exported outside the U.S.
Asked by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell if he will allow Nvidia to sell its most advanced chips to China, Trump said he wouldn’t.
“We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced,” Trump said. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”
The UAE’s ability to access chips is tied to its pledge to invest $1.4 trillion in U.S. energy and AI-related projects, an outsized sum given its annual GDP is roughly $540 billion.
The UAE ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, said in a statement earlier this year that the arrangement was “setting a new ‘Gold Standard’ for securing AI models, chips, data and access.”
Microsoft’s announcement Monday was part of the company’s planned $15.2 billion investment in technology in the UAE, which is says has some of the highest per-capita usage of AI. Microsoft had already accumulated in the UAE more than 21,000 of Nvidia’s graphics processor chips, known as GPUs, through licenses approved under then-President Joe Biden.
“We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself,” said a company statement.