Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends an event, “Investing in America,” held by President Donald Trump in Washington, April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
U.S. tech giants Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle and OpenAI are supporting the “UAE Stargate” artificial intelligence data center announced this week, multiple people familiar with the deal confirmed Friday.
AI chip leader Nvidia will supply hardware with the latest Blackwell GB300 systems, one person, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, confirmed.
The data center will collaborate with the AI infrastructure project of the same name in the U.S. announced by President Donald Trump shortly after his inauguration in January, according to that person.
Oracle is also involved in UAE Stargate, another person who asked not to be named in order to speak freely said. Co-founder Larry Ellison was part of the U.S. Stargate announcement.
UAE Stargate will be built in the United Arab Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, by the Emirati firm G42, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, which announced the data center. The massive campus will have 5-gigawatt capacity and cover 10 square miles.
Trump was in the UAE as part of his first state visit trip abroad in his second term. He also visited Saudi Arabia.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Cisco President Jeetu Patel were all in the UAE as well.
Cisco, Nvidia and OpenAI all declined to comment for this story.
The first phase of UAE Stargate includes a 1-gigawatt compute cluster, according to the Trump administration.
OpenAI announced in February that it was considering building U.S. Stargate data center campuses in 16 states that had indicated “real interest” in the project.
The 16 states are Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.
Construction on the data center in Abilene, Texas, is underway and is expected to be completed in mid-2026.
On Tuesday in Saudi Arabia, Huang announced that Nvidia would sell 18,000 Blackwell chips to Saudi company Humain.
The GB300 chips, which were announced earlier this year, will be used in data centers totaling 500 megawatts in Saudi Arabia, according to remarks at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh.
AMD said it would also supply chips to Humain. The company said that Humain has committed $10 billion to the project.
— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this story.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/trump-middle-east-openai.html
