Trump Just Gave Away The AI Store To His Sheikh Friends But Don't Worry, He's Making A Killing
Human rights are great, but have you tried ARMS SALES?
Trump went to the Middle East for four days, and the big talk is about is how there was a McDonald’s truck, and his Happy Meal prize was a depreciating Qatari plane!
Obligatory clips.
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Also, how about these ladies in Abu Dhabi who did their hair dance at him!
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And how about how he flew home TruthSocialing his venom at un-hot Taylor Swift, and Bruce Springsteen’s “atrophied” skin?
But let’s not move on so soon from his Middle East dazzling bromance, which even the Wall Street Journal marveled at!
“I like you too much,” Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, later placing his hand on his heart as the two men bid farewell on the airport tarmac. Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa was “attractive” and “tough,” Trump said after a surprise meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with the former rebel leader who toppled Syria’s longtime dictator in December. Trump said Qatar’s ruling emir and his family were “tall, handsome guys.”
“You’re a magnificent man,” Trump said Thursday at the royal palace here, as he sat beside Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates.
Are we in a Christopher Street bathhouse? Their eyes are up there!
The gameshow host has always been obsessed with everybody’s looks, which is why Pete Hegseth needs a makeup room, and all the women trying to get into in his orbit get a Mar-a-Lago face installed.
If only he would gush at our allies that way!
But he wasn’t just there to gaze and preen, he was there to make DEALS, so many deals, deals like you’ve never seen before, and he will help the UAE build the world’s largest data processing center. Hey, weren’t AMERICAN children supposed to get jobs at a data processing center so they can afford more than two dolls? And sorry, Elon and you techbrosephs back home, but daddy needs deals!
If even the New York Times is wondering, “Is Trump Trading Away America’s Tech Future?” probably he’s trading away America’s tech future.
First, naturally, Art O’Deal made some deals before he even arrived, because the Trump family needs some sugar in their bowl to get ‘em going. On top of that $2 billion-plus that Jared Kushner got in Middle Eastern fun money, they got a $5.5 billion real estate and golf course deal in Doha with the Qatari government, to go with Trump tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a forthcoming tower in Dubai where one can buy condos in Bitcoin. And the UAE’s government investment fund is giving Eric Trump and Steve Witkoff’s son Zach $2 billion (with a b) to put into crypto-coin on a scammy exchange.
One more clip, Trump in 2016!
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After arrival, his biggest deal was with Saudi Arabia was a $142 billion-with-a-b weapons package for them, in what the White House claims is the largest arms deal in history. And he plans to sell Qatar and the United Arab Emirates $3.5 billion worth of helicopters and weapons too. Just what the anti-Democratic government that murdered a journalist needs, more weapons. Democrats are opposing this, FWIW.
In exchange, Saudi Arabia vaguely made a commitment to invest $600 billion, or maybe $300 billion, into a trade partnership with the US, for some vaguely defined “transformative deals.”
Oh hey, was the Saudi government involved in the transformative deal that was 9/11? Guess we will never really know!
And there was something special in his stocking for the UAE, to thank them for their purchase of 28 Boeing/GE planes: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang popped out to help announce that the UAE will ALSO now be favored to buy Nvidia chips, and the US will help the UAE government build the world’s largest data processing center, an AI hub run by the government’s tech firm, G42, which the US will help to stock with 500,000 Nvidia chips per year, about one-fifth of the company’s entire output, leaving the remaining estimated 2.5 million chips the company makes every year to be split among every other country and all the US companies.
Quite a gift!
The chips are a big deal, the powerful hardware running all AI software, and Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, is more valuable than Amazon, Apple, or Alphabet. CEO Jensen Huang is a dual Taiwanese and US citizen, and Nvidia currently does all its manufacturing in Taiwan, because the talent pool there is deep and cheap, and the employees all work like 14 hours a day.
Handsome Joe Biden and the bipartisan CHIPs Act put strict export controls on Nvidia’s chips, and also subsidized the US semiconductor industry, because Republicans used to want to boost the industry and keep the world’s most powerful computer hardware from falling into the hands of the likes of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. But Trump wants to repeal the CHIPs Act, and replace it with whatever deal-arting carrots and tariff-threat sticks. And the Commerce Department has already laid off 40 of the CHIPs office employees. Impoundment, what’s that?
Replicating Nvidia chips isn’t easy, because the company is the developer of them with the oldest, biggest infrastructure and is constantly developing, but Chinese researchers are closing the gap; market researchers say China is now months, instead of years, behind.
Nvidia started out making units for graphics processing for video games, which required hardware complex and powerful enough to do a whole bunch of calculations at the same time. And “whole bunch of calculations at the same time” is what you need if you want to build, say, an AI robot that can learn how to do the dishes, seduce an incel, or model out battle plans. And while there’s lots of AI software companies, they all run on the hardware of Nvidia chips.
There are competitors, but even China’s DeepSeek AI model breakthrough was built on a downgraded Nvidia chip, the H20. As part of his trade genius, Trump threatened to impose curbs on the sale of the H20 to China, but reversed course after CEO Jensen Huang went to a $1 million-a-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago last month, and agreed to build Nvidia’s first chip-manufacturing plant in the US.
And so now UAE’s government will be getting an even bigger AI data processing center with even more Nvidia chips than even Trump’s US techbromance buddies like Elon Musk have for their data processing. Trump screws his enemies hard, and his friends harder!
Apparently no longer willing to be subject to the business uncertainties that come with Trump in charge, and 14 percent of their business in China, Nvidia says they are now building an R&D facility in Shanghai, too. Always smart to hedge bets!
So, great job there, Art O’Deal! After all of that heaving about how AI is the future and kids have to learn it, just send the AI chips somewhere else.
Hey, wonder how Princess Latifa is doing in Dubai?
Anyway, THE END!
[New Yorker / NYT / WSJ ]
The end, unless you would like to read more about the CEO and founder of Nvidia, because he is interesting! Jensen Huang was born in Taiwan, and at age nine he was sent by his parents to live in the US, despite not being able to speak English. Then he and his brother were sent to a Baptist boarding school by accident:
Oneida Baptist Institute, in Kentucky, which Huang’s uncle believed was a prestigious boarding school. In fact, it was a religious reform academy. Huang was placed with a seventeen-year-old roommate. On their first night together, the older boy lifted his shirt to show Huang the numerous places where he’d been stabbed in fights. “Every student smoked, and I think I was the only boy at the school without a pocketknife,” Huang told me. His roommate was illiterate; in exchange for teaching him to read, Huang said, “he taught me how to bench-press. I ended up doing a hundred pushups every night before bed.”
But Huang was a genius, skipped two grades, and worked and went to Stanford at night while his wife stayed home with their babies. He founded the company to make graphics processing chips for video games. They were going to call it NVision, but a toilet paper company already had that copyright.
When Huang was asked by a New Yorker reporter writing a book about him if he worried that AI was leading us all into an Arthur C. Clarke dystopia, he went into a cussing, screaming fit.
Huang has been described as apolitical, and did not attend Trump’s inauguration.
And after Trump’s UAE data center announcement, Huang’s net worth went up $12 billion.
What I don’t get is how quick and easy it is for America to turn against Democrats.
Biden is old? Voters have major concerns!
Inflation under Biden? His policies are a disaster!
But when Trump literally burns your fucking house down. The public goes: Gee, I don’t know. I’m gonna need the Dems to buy me a pony before I turn on Trump. 🤷♂️
On the passing of an improvisational engineering great-
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/ed-smylie-who-saved-the-apollo-13-crew-with-duct-tape-dies-at-95/