Executives including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, were in Saudi Arabia for for new investments. That, not tariffs, is what they wanted from Trump.
“A lot of checks”
Business leaders who had high hopes for the second Trump administration hadn’t signed up for the turmoil of his trade war. President Trump’s deals-focused visit to Saudi Arabia is more of what they had in mind.
Leaving aside questions of how many of the multibillion-dollar agreements the administration announced on Tuesday were actually new, the first leg of Trump’s trip to the Middle East underscores that his transactional instincts are what corporate leaders have been betting on.
Here are highlights of what was announced on Tuesday:
A nearly $142 billion defense agreement involving over a dozen American companies and covering air force and space abilities, border security, communications and more
A deal for Nvidia to sell about 18,000 of its latest chips to the Saudi artificial intelligence start-up Humain to power new data centers, and for AMD to sell about $10 billion worth of processors to Humain as well — with shares of both chipmakers soaring on Tuesday
About $80 billion worth of investments by Google, Oracle, Uber and others in “cutting-edge transformative technologies in both countries”
About $19 billion worth in total of gas turbine by GE Vernova and plane exports by Boeing
A commitment by DataVolt, a Saudi company, to invest $20 billion in artificial intelligence data centers and energy infrastructure in the U.S.
Saudi Arabia’s approval of Starlink use in the region, according to Elon Musk
The deal flow is why top corporate leaders were in Riyadh yon Tuesday. Consider who was at a U.S.-Saudi investment lunch: Musk; Jensen Huang of Nvidia (whom Trump gave a shout-out to, while noting that Tim Cook of Apple wasn’t present); Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is raising billions to build data centers as well as selling A.I. services; Larry Fink of BlackRock, who has assiduously courted Saudi wealth; Andy Jassy of Amazon; Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber; Alex Karp of the data consulting firm Palantir; Kelly Ortberg of Boeing; and more.
It’s also an environment — décor-wise, sure, but also focused on deals — that Trump appeared to enjoy. “We have the biggest business leaders in the world here,” he said. “They’re going to walk away with a lot of checks.”
Never mind that the announced deals are falling far short of Trump’s goal. The White House said it had secured $600 billion worth of investment commitments from Saudi Arabia. But the announced total so far is about $283 billion, and organizers of the investment forum said that 145 deals were signed for a total of a bit over $300 billion. And several of the deals have been in the works before Trump’s second term.
The president has pressed Saudi officials to commit to more than $1 trillion (and bring down the price of oil, to boot). But that figure exceeds the assets held by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund — which has already said it wants to invest less abroad and instead focus on the domestic economy.