Saudi Arabia expects to get access to Nvidia’s high performance chips ‘within the next year’
Saudi Arabia is optimistic about gaining access to U.S. chipmaker Nvidia’s high-performance chips, which would enable it to develop and operate the most advanced artificial intelligence models.
Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, a top official at the Saudi Data and AI Authority, Abdulrahman Tariq Habib, said the kingdom expected to make such a stride in the next year.
“I think within the next year,” Habib, Deputy CEO of SDAIA’s strategy management office, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy after being asked about a potential timeline. It’s a significant expectation given that the United States’ strict export controls have thus far prevented the chips’ export to the kingdom. Habib made the comments on the sidelines of GAIN, Saudi Arabia’s international AI summit, which took place in Riyadh this week.
It “will mean a lot” for Saudi Arabia to have access to the chips, Habib said — in this case, the Nvidia H200s, the firm’s most powerful chips, which are used in OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
“It will ease business between Saudi and U.S.,” he said. “It will also open a lot of doors for building the capability, the computational capabilities, in the kingdom. But most importantly, it’s not only the computational capability that’s important. We worked hard in the past three years in building capacity, in human capacity, we also build data capacity as well. So we are working and collaborating with all [of the] international community and contributing [to] be one of the top active countries in data analysis.”
Saudi Arabia is pouring considerable investment into developing a robust AI ecosystem in the kingdom, disclosing in a report by SDAIA that it aims to have AI make up 12% of its gross domestic product by 2030. According to the report, published on Sept. 9, the kingdom’s $925 billion Public Investment Fund will lead the investment.
Those efforts are part of Vision 2030, an initiative launched by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to modernize the Saudi economy and diversify its revenues away from oil.
In March, sources confirmed to CNBC that the PIF was in talks with American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and potentially others to create a $40 billion fund to invest in AI.
U.S. chip export restrictions
The news that the U.S. government is considering easing its export rules to allow Saudi Arabia access to the coveted chips — first reported by Semafor — is an indicator of the positive relationship between Riyadh and Washington in the AI space, Habib said.
“It shows the collaboration and the work that we do with the international organization overall, and the U.S. in specific,” he said. “And that shows also the understanding of how Saudi is an emerging powerhouse in AI, in investment and in producing products in AI, with the with U.S.”
A Nvidia chip displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai on June 26, 2024.
Strs Afp | Getty Images
The Biden administration imposed a series of restrictions on chip exports in the last two years an effort to prevent Chinese access to them. In May, it broadened those restrictions, introducing a requirement that firms obtain a special U.S. government license to export advanced semiconductors and chipmaking material to many countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The curbs stemmed from national security concerns over Riyadh’s close relationship with Beijing. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner, and is a significant investor in Vision 2030. Between 2016 and 2020, Chinese arms exports to the kingdom increased by nearly 400% from the previous five-year period, according to the Gulf Research Center.
The Saudi government is reportedly working to meet Washington’s demands with regard to its relationship with China and the U.S.’ security concerns, while also keeping the door open to Beijing in the event that the U.S. refuses to export its chips to the kingdom, the Semafor report said.
CNBC has contacted the U.S. Department of Commerce for comment.
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.
The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.
“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”
The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.
“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.
Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.
In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.
Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”
But no announcement has come yet.
In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”
OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.
On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.
“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”
OpenAI declined to comment.
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