The CEO of the UAE’s leading artificial intelligence company emphasized that the Gulf country is a reliable partner of the US in keeping sensitive technology safe, like Washington he is said to be thinking restricts chip sales to certain countries — particularly those in the Middle East.
The UAE has shown it can “guarantee the safety and security” of the chips “if and when they are developed and used here,” Peng Xiao, CEO of UAE artificial intelligence firm G42, told CNBC at a conference in Dubai on Tuesday.
His comments come as President Joe Biden’s administration continues to weigh limits on chip sales from Nvidia and AMD in the Middle East, according to Bloomberg, due to fears that American technology and intellectual property could end up in Chinese hands.
“I can’t read the minds of US policymakers, but in many ways I understand their position,” Xiao told CNBC.
“At the same time, for our part, we have shown from the UAE side how transparent we are and how we can guarantee the safety and security of this technology,” he added.
“So I think it opens the door for us to do a lot more. I believe we will see more and more cooperation, more and more sharing of technology, more and more joint development of artificial intelligence between our two countries.”
The CEO did not elaborate on the measures taken to ensure the security of potential chip imports. CNBC reached out to the company for more details.
The United States has forewarned about the G42’s ties to China and its cooperation with companies in Beijing, which Washington considers a potential security threat. In February, the team sold its stake in Chinese companies including Bytedance in an attempt to reassure American partners. Earlier this year, CNBC spoke with G42 Chief Technology Officer Kiril Evtimov about the company’s decision to cut ties with China, which Evtimov described as a commercial and technological decision.
An Nvidia chip shown at the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai on June 26, 2024.
Strs Afp | Getty Images
In a major nod of approval for the UAE’s AI ambitions, Microsoft signed a $1.5 billion deal in April with Abu Dhabi’s G42. Last month, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan led a delegation to Washington that included Xiao and G42 Chairman Sheikh Tahnoon.
The United Arab Emirates and the US issued a joint statement in this regard artificial intelligence collaboration at the time, reaffirming their shared intention to “advance cooperation in artificial intelligence and related technologies” and “develop a government-to-government memorandum of understanding on artificial intelligence between the US and the UAE.”
Describing the visit, Xiao told CNBC that at a “government-to-government level, the bilateral relationship between [the] USA and [the] The UAE could not be stronger.”
Before the trip in late September, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote in a post on X that “Few countries are advancing so rapidly in advanced technologies and artificial intelligence—and so closely in sync with the US— as much as UAE.”
The UAE already has investments in the US amounting to $1 trillion. The country’s massive sovereign wealth funds, which include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala, are major investors in US real estate, infrastructure and technology sectors.
Abu Dhabi hopes to expand this partnership through artificial intelligence. In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the UAE could act as the world’s “regulatory sandbox” for testing artificial intelligence.
The UAE is not alone in the region in its AI ambitions. Saudi Arabia is also pushing to gain access to advanced US manufacturing technology — in this case, Nvidia H200s, the company’s most powerful chips, which are used in OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
And the kingdom is optimistic — a top official at Saudi Arabia’s Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, Abdulrahman Tariq Habib, told CNBC in mid-September that he expected to see such a development “within the next year.”