Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) have held talks with United Arab Emirates (UAE) officials that could see the semiconductor behemoths establish plants in the swashbuckling Persian Gulf state reportedly worth more than $100 billion.
First reported last month, the development comes amid a determined push by the UAE to establish itself as a global hub for advanced technologies and shrink the emirates’ dependence on hydrocarbon revenues. Mubadala, an Abu Dhabi sovereign fund, is reportedly playing a prominent role in the discussions with Samsung and TSMC, which are being pitched as a means to plug deficiencies in the global chip supply chain.
However, the UAE’s increasingly assertive efforts to become the pre-eminent regional economy could place it at the center of the standoff between Washington and Beijing over leadership in cutting-edge technology, primarily semiconductors. The Biden administration has previously been skeptical of the emirates’ tech ambitions, earlier slowing shipments to the region, analysts say.
Those reservations appear to have been tamped down by Microsoft’s $1.5 billion investment in G42, Abu Dhabi’s principal artificial intelligence (AI) firm in April, which has been interpreted as a move by the US to ensure that the UAE does not become a conduit for the transfer of proprietary technology to China. Nvidia, the US chipmaker at the forefront of AI development, has reportedly received the regulatory green light to sell chips, including its critical Hopper H100 AI GPUs, to the UAE as the petrostate invests in data centers. The emirates are also partnering with the chipmaker to develop a climate tech lab in Abu Dhabi using AI-powered climate and weather modeling across the globe. Last month, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan made an official visit to the US that in addition to discussions on Middle East tensions, included talks with the leaders of BlackRock, Microsoft and Nvidia.