According to Bloomberg, the outfit has been in talks with US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and MGX, the UAE’s state-owned investment firm. The discussions are about building a plant roughly the size of the one TSMC is cooking up in Arizona.
Samsung and TSMC have flirted with the idea of building fabs in the UAE before. Executives from both firms reportedly had a nosy round the region in the third quarter of 2024. TSMC even chatted to the Biden lot about it, but those talks stalled after Washington demanded sovereign control of the site. Unsurprisingly, the UAE wasn’t too thrilled with that.
Two major reasons are rattling the cages in DC. First, there’s concern it would drain focus and people from the $165 billion Arizona expansion, including the $42 billion planned for 2025. Second, and more paranoid, is national security. The UAE might be pals with the US now, but with China and Iran floating about the region, that allegiance could shift. A cutting-edge chip factory out of US hands could be a tempting treat for those the US is trying to freeze out.
There’s the small matter of expertise. The UAE doesn’t have a huge local talent pool to run a fab, so TSMC would have to reassign key engineers from elsewhere, potentially gutting the team supporting US operations.
Despite the raised eyebrows in Washington, the UAE is still gunning to be a regional tech power. It already bagged approval to get Nvidia AI GPUs through its own outfit G42, and OpenAI plans to plonk a 1 GW Stargate AI data centre in Abu Dhabi.
David Sacks, who carried the Trump administration’s AI and crypto briefcase, is reportedly not opposed. He reckons the US should be spreading its AI tech more widely unless it fancies losing out to Chinese firms. Of course, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Dubai: collaboration between the Trump Organization and developers Dar Al Arkan and DarGlobal, is slated for completion by December 2031 and no one wants to upset that project or that UAE-controlled funds invested $2 billion into a Trump-linked stablecoin.
