Trump admin eases UAE AI chip exports: license-free for G42, Core42; Warren blasts deal
The U.S. Department of Commerce downgraded export controls on the United Arab Emirates on July 10, 2026, allowing license-free exports of advanced AI chips, servers, and other computing items to UAE government entities and approved companies including G42, Core42, Amazon, Apple, and xAI. The move reclassified the UAE to a country grouping with more license exceptions for military and dual-use items, citing decades of counter-Iran defense partnership and the UAE's recent role in the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran (Operation Epic Fury) in February 2026.
Under the new framework, aligned with a May 2025 bilateral U.S.-UAE AI cooperation agreement, the Commerce Department removed previous restrictions on Blackwell-class chips. The annual export cap allows up to 500,000 AI chips to the UAE, with ~20% (100,000 units) reserved for G42—the Emirati AI holding company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Earlier, the Trump administration authorized ~$1 billion in NVIDIA H200 and AMD MI325X shipments; the Commerce Department also permits Microsoft's internal transfers to G42 partners. Senate Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren, introduced a resolution condemning the deal, citing national security risks around G42's ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex and questioning the timing with Tahnoon's $500 million investment in Trump family crypto ventures.
The UAE has been pursuing advanced chip access for years. In November 2025, after Trump's May 2025 Gulf trip, the U.S. first approved Blackwell exports to G42 and Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN. The January 2026 policy pivot—reversing Obama-era "AI Diffusion" export restrictions—formalized this shift. The UAE aims to build a 5 GW AI campus (announced May 2025), with SoftBank, Microsoft, and U.S. infrastructure operators as deployment partners. The Commerce Department framed the reclassification as supporting "U.S. AI digital infrastructure" investments and Gulf partnerships.
For architects: this represents a geopolitical inflection. Export controls are now negotiable trade assets, not fixed technical restrictions. The UAE-first move creates a 500K-chip-per-year offshore compute tier with lower oversight than U.S. data centers. The implication: frontier-grade AI training and inference capacity is shifting to sovereign-wealth-backed markets beyond traditional allied control. The Anthropic ($1.25B/month) and Google ($920M/month) Cloud contracts already signal private compute scarcity; offshore government-backed capacity will compress available U.S. enterprise access further.