Roughly six months passed between the May 2025 US–UAE framework and the first actual licences to ship Nvidia GPUs to the Emirates, and the November 2025 authorisation covers up to 35,000 Blackwell GB300-equivalents per company — far less than the headline figures. The July 2026 liberalisation applies only to the UAE, only to listed entities, and comes with an expiry date.
In November 2025 Microsoft president Brad Smith said something companies normally keep quiet: in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft was running out of compute capacity. Half a year had passed since Donald Trump’s Gulf tour, since the announcements about hundreds of thousands of semiconductors heading to the region, since the signing of the US–UAE artificial intelligence cooperation framework. In that time the Commerce Department had not issued a single export licence. The data centres existed. The power existed. The contracts existed. The cards did not.
The cards in question are Nvidia GB300 systems, accelerators built for one purpose: training and running large machine learning models — the kind that learn from vast corpora of text, images and code and generate predictions token by token. They are not general-purpose processors. A 200-megawatt cluster packed with GB300s exists to do industrial-scale training and inference; without the chips, the rest of the infrastructure is an air-conditioned shed. This is precisely where American trade policy touches artificial intelligence directly: it does not regulate the models, it regulates the silicon that makes them possible, using an instrument as old as export licensing.
What was announced versus what was authorised
Two categories of fact are worth keeping apart, because coverage tends to blur them.
The announcements: in May 2025 Nvidia disclosed 18,000 GB300 GPUs destined for Saudi Arabia’s Humain, with a stated goal of up to 500 MW of data centre capacity and “several hundred thousand” chips in the region over the following five years. That same month the U.S.–UAE Artificial Intelligence Cooperation framework was signed, with an Emirati commitment to matching investment in US digital infrastructure. In Abu Dhabi a ten-square-mile, five-gigawatt campus began taking shape, operated by G42 alongside American hyperscalers; the first phase — 200 MW of a 1 GW cluster — is being developed by Khazna with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank, targeted for completion in the third quarter of 2026, with more than five thousand construction workers on site.
The authorisations: on 3 November 2025 Microsoft became the first company to obtain licences to ship Nvidia GB300 chips to the Emirates. Nvidia stock rose 2% that day. On 10 November, G42 — which has had Microsoft as a shareholder since 2024 — was still waiting for its own. Only between 19 and 20 November, immediately after the Saudi crown prince’s visit to Washington, did Commerce authorise advanced semiconductor exports to G42 and Humain, up to the equivalent of 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell GB300 chips each, consistent with the July 2025 AI Action Plan and conditional on compliance with security measures.
Thirty-five thousand GB300-equivalents per company is not “hundreds of thousands of chips for the Gulf”. It is a different order of magnitude, and the gap is not rhetorical: it is the difference between an authorised industrial strategy and a conditional first tranche. Note also that the official statement refers to equivalent chips while parts of the trade press reported “GB300 systems” — two readings that diverge sharply in actual GPU count and in value. The economic value of the licences, reported loosely as “several billion dollars”, has never been specified.
Time is the economic variable
The most instructive part of this story is not about quantities. It is about latency. A 200 MW data centre is not an investment you pause: land, transformers, cooling, labour and power purchase agreements are committed years before the hardware arrives. If licences slip by six months, that spending sits idle, and someone carries the cost of the stranded capital.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos on 21 January 2026, G42 chief executive Peng Xiao said the first shipments would arrive “within months”, enabling the first 200 MW of the 1 GW cluster, followed by an additional 200–500 MW per quarter up to 5 GW. He added that supply would be “mostly” Nvidia but would also include AMD and Cerebras, and that authorisation had followed formal assurances to the US government on two points: that the hardware cannot be re-exported, and that there are no backdoors enabling unauthorised remote access.
That second commitment is the technically interesting one. It means control is no longer exercised only at the border, but across the machine’s lifecycle: who can reach it, from where, with which credentials. It is a form of compute sovereignty that travels with the compute itself.
July 2026: a liberalisation by name, not by geography
On 10 July 2026 BIS removed the UAE from Country Groups D:3 and D:4 and reclassified it into A:5, citing its Major Defense Partner status. The final rule, published on 14 July, created a new Supplement No. 8 to Part 740 of the EAR listing approved recipients for License Exception STA and for licence-free shipments. It covers ECCNs 3A090.a, 4A090.a, 3A090.b, 4A090.b and “.z” items.
Read quickly, this sounds like the Emirates now have open access. They do not, and the details matter:
- the list has three categories: UAE government agencies; G42 and Core42; and several US AI companies and their subsidiaries;
- G42 and Core42 may receive chips licence-free but do not get License Exception STA, unlike the US firms, which have both;
- eligibility for G42 and Core42 lapses unless they “become US companies” by a 2027 deadline — Skadden gives 10 April, other accounts cite 270 days and 6 April, and only the rule text settles it;
- none of this waives the end-use and end-user requirements of Part 744;
- other entities may request inclusion through a BIS advisory opinion.
MGX, the Emirati investment vehicle, appears in the rule as benefiting from a favourable licence review policy, but is not among the Approved Entities. Worth remembering: G42 is controlled and chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the UAE president and national security adviser, and also chairman of MGX.
The heaviest constraint is an undefined phrase
The “become US companies” clause is the economically decisive element of the whole architecture, and it is also the one for which available sources offer no threshold. It is unclear whether it means reincorporation in the United States, a particular shareholding structure, a US-majority board, or some combination. That definition determines whether Abu Dhabi’s national AI champion stays Emirati or becomes, in legal terms, something else.
Here the American approach shows its nature: not a control regime organised by country, but one organised by entity — renegotiable, with deadlines and corporate governance conditions attached. The January 2025 AI Diffusion Rule, with its three tiers placing the UAE and Saudi Arabia outside Tier 1, was never enforced; in May 2025 BIS announced it would not apply it and would issue a replacement. What filled the gap were case-by-case arrangements. Saudi Arabia, unlike the UAE, shows no comparable country-group reclassification: Humain remains managed licence by licence.
What we don’t know, and why it matters
No verified source states how many chips have physically landed in the Gulf. The last solid data point remains the Davos statement of January 2026. For a sector that measures itself in announced gigawatts, that is a meaningful omission: the systematic gap between announcement and shipment is exactly what forced Microsoft to admit publicly that it was short of capacity while press releases spoke of hundreds of thousands of accelerators.
For an outside observer — a European company deciding where to place a training workload, an investor weighing Gulf exposure — the practical conclusion is singular: in this market the scarce input is not capital, not power, not even Nvidia’s output. It is a signature on a licence, and that signature has an expiry date written into it.