It appears that Saudi Arabia is engaged in a full-on MAGA-washing campaign, cozying up to the Trump administration and its lackeys in order to improve its image by getting billionaires to do business there. It appears to be working. At the US-Saudi investment forum held on Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, XAI, will build a 500 MW data center in Saudi Arabia.
According to The New York Times, the build-out—which will be the largest data center outside the US—will be part of a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned AI startup Humane and will tap Nvidia to provide the chips that will power the project. It is also part of a larger package of deals between US companies and Saudi Arabia, which also includes Trump’s decision to sell F-35s to the country despite Pentagon concerns.
The partnership between Musk and Saudi Arabia makes sense on many levels. Despite the outcome of his Musk claims that Trump is in the Epstein files, he remains the most high-profile MAGA-aligned executive there. The two are no strangers to each other, as Saudi Arabia’s investment arm, Kingdom Holding Co., was one of the largest financiers of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
They are also natural partners based on their desires. Musk wants to expand They’ve already built a controversial 300-MW data center in Memphis, but this project will be the largest cluster for xAI to date.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia wants to bring in tech money to diversify its sources of wealth beyond oil, and it has plenty of land, electricity and fiber optic wires it is ready to deploy. Humane, the state’s AI project, aims to power six percent of all AI processing in the coming years. This data center will be an important step towards that goal.
The data center still faces some hurdles, including the fact that Saudi Arabia cannot currently purchase the latest and greatest chips from Nvidia due to export controls imposed by the Trump administration. But don’t worry, Trump is more than happy to lift those restrictions so Humann can meet its goal of deploying 400,000 AI chips by 2030. Tariq Amin, the head of Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence startup Human, is finding favor with the Trump administration for precisely this reason, including a promise not to do business with Chinese companies like Huawei.
If there was any doubt, it appears you can still grease the wheels of bargaining with the Trump administration with flattery and favoritism.