White House announces slew of "new" deals across AI and energy sectors

• The Trump administration announced a wide array of new deals on Thursday.
• Despite the overall upbeat sentiment from White House sources, most deals appear to have already existed or been in the works prior to January.
• The specific dollar amounts of the announced deals, and how they were calculated, remains unclear.

Staff from the Trump administration have been hard at work on Thursday, pushing a raft of announcements on a wide range of investment projects with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that President Trump has been pursuing hard since taking office in January. As is usual for announcements from several faces of the White House team, specific details remain thin, and it remains unclear what kind of timeline these announced projects are expected to take, or how they'll even be accomplished.

According to the US Commerce Department, the United Arab Emirates and the US government have agreed on an "AI acceleration partnership agreement". This comes hot on the heels of a freshly-inked deal between OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and the Saudi government to begin building and operating large-scale data centers in Saudi Arabia, overseen by the new AI investment arm of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, dubbed Humain. Humain is overseen by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who also oversees the Neom project to build a 'linear smart city', which was initially expected to be 200 meters wide and 170 kilometers long.

A lot of deals announced, but new benefits to US economy not immediately clear

The White House also re-announced that President Trump had 'secured' nearly $200B in US-UAE deals, but it remains unclear what the specifics of these deals are related to. It was also announced that Donald Trump had 'accelerated' the UAE's recent agreement to invest 1.4T in the US economy over ten years. Taking into account the ten year timeline, this agreement would mean the UAE would be investing 27% of its entire national Gross Domestic Product on an annual basis in US business ventures. How President Trump and the UAE intend to accomplish this feat of financial mathematics remains to seen or explained.

According to a White House fact sheets, Amazon Web Services and the UAE Cybersecurity Council have agreed to launch a "sovereign cloud launchpad". The Trump administration does not appear to be aware that Amazon is developing this project for the UAE's digital projects.

The White House fact sheet also went on to highlight a new arrangement between Raytheon, Emirate's Global Aluminum, and the Tawazun Industrial Park Council on a gallium critical minerals deal, which is meant to provide critical materials to the RTX facility that is producing the Coyote counter-drone interceptor in the UAE.

The White House also re-announced an agreement between Boeing, GE Aerospace, and the UAE, which appears to be part of a decade-long deal initially agreed to by the three parties in October of 2024. The White House also announced a deal between ExxonMobil and several UAE energy companies to expand oil and natural gas production in the UAE.

Finally, Trump administration staff also announced that the EGA would be investing 4B to develop an aluminum project in Oklahoma. This appears to be tied to one of three purchases of American refining businesses the UAE had already been exploring since 2024, and mostly involves the UAE acquiring US-founded businesses.