One of the marquee events of US President Donald Trump's recent trip to the Middle East was a high-powered lunch at the royal court in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh.

The guest list of those joining Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman caught the eye. Alongside Tesla chief confidante Elon Musk were some of the biggest names in global artificial intelligence (AI) — Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Sam Altman of ChatGPT parent OpenAI, Google president Ruth Porat and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, to name a few.

Their collective presence soon made sense, when several US tech firms announced a range of deals with Saudi Arabia on AI funding worth tens of billions of dollars during the Trump visit.

Among the most eye-catching: Nvidia agreed to sell hundreds of thousands of high-end chips to Humain, a new state-back Saudi AI venture unveiled the day before Trump arrived. Meanwhile the chip designer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and chipmaker Qualcomm also made major commitments.

It comes as Saudi Arabia ramps up investment in artificial intelligence and as the Trump administration seeks to cement US supremacy in machine learning and the production of high-end semiconductors.

Karen E. Young, a Middle East expert at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy in New York, believes the US and Saudi Arabia are........

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