For Trump, It's a New Era of Deal-Making With Tech's Most-Coveted Commodity

As President Trump tours the Middle East this week, governments that are flush with oil wealth will be focused on a different treasure, found in America's Silicon Valley. Artificial intelligence chips, which are made by U.S. companies like Nvidia and AMD, are highly coveted by governments across the Middle East. Leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates want to pour billions of dollars into the construction of data centers to put their countries at the forefront of a new technology heralded for its power to disrupt businesses and create trillions of dollars in economic value. The Gulf States have plenty of energy and cash to build data centers, which house the supercomputers that run A.I. systems. But they need U.S. government approval to buy the American-designed chips to power them.