UAE can guarantee the ‘safety and the security’ of chips, G42 CEO says

The CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ premier AI firm stressed that the Gulf country is a reliable partner to the U.S. when it comes to keeping sensitive technology safe, as Washington reportedly mulls curbs on chip sales to certain countries — particularly those in the Middle East.

The UAE has shown it can “guarantee the safety and the security” of chips “if and when they are being deployed and used here,” Peng Xiao, CEO of UAE AI firm G42, told CNBC at a conference in Dubai on Tuesday.

His comments come as the administration of President Joe Biden continues to weigh limits on chip sales from Nvidia and AMD to the Middle East, according to Bloomberg, over fears that American technology and intellectual property could end up in the hands of China.

“I cannot read the mind of the U.S. policymakers, but in many ways, I understand their position,” Xiao told CNBC.

“At the same time from our side, we’ve shown from the UAE side how transparent we are and how we can guarantee the safety and the security of this technology,” he added.

“So I think the door is opening up for us to do a lot more. I believe we’ll see more and more collaboration, more and more technology sharing, more and more joint development of AI between our two countries.” 

The CEO did not elaborate further on what measures were being taken to ensure the security of potential chip imports. CNBC has contacted the company for additional details.

The United States has previously warned over G42’s ties to China and its work with companies in Beijing, which Washington considers a possible security threat. In February, the group sold its stake in Chinese companies including Bytedance in a bid to reassure American partners. Earlier this year, CNBC spoke to G42’s Chief Technology Officer Kiril Evtimov about the company’s decision to cut ties with China, which Evtimov described as a commercial and technological decision. 

In a significant nod of approval for the UAE’s AI ambitions, Microsoft signed a $1.5 billion deal in April with Abu Dhabi’s G42. Last month, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan led a delegation to Washington, which included Xiao and G42 Chairman Sheikh Tahnoon. 

The UAE and U.S. released a joint statement on artificial intelligence cooperation at the time, reaffirming their shared intention “to promote cooperation in AI and related technologies” and to “develop a government-to-government memorandum of understanding on AI between the U.S. and the UAE.”

Describing the visit, Xiao told CNBC that at the “government-to-government level, the relationship bilaterally between [the] U.S. and [the] UAE cannot be stronger.”

Ahead of the late September trip, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote in a post on X that “Few countries are moving as fast on advanced technologies and artificial intelligence — and as closely in sync with the U.S. — as the UAE.”

The UAE already has investments in the U.S. that total $1 trillion. The country’s huge sovereign wealth funds, which include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala, are major investors in American real estate, infrastructure and technology sectors. 

Abu Dhabi hopes to expand that partnership through AI. In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the UAE could serve as the world’s “regulatory sandbox” to test artificial intelligence.

The UAE is not alone in the region when it comes to AI ambitions. Saudi Arabia is also pushing to get access to the advanced U.S.-made technology — in this case, the Nvidia H200s, the firm’s most powerful chips, which are used in OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

And the kingdom is optimistic — a top official at the Saudi Data and AI Authority, Abdulrahman Tariq Habib, told CNBC in mid-September that he expected to see such a development “within the next year.”