Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on May 15 raised
concerns that the United States’ new chip deals in the Middle East may allow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its military to gain access to the very technology the United States has tried to restrict.
President Donald Trump announced
several multibillion-dollar deals during his
trip to the Middle East from May 13 to May 16, which
include plans to build out a major AI campus in the United Arab Emirates. Major American AI companies signed deals, including Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and Google. The UAE has also agreed to build, invest in, or finance comparable data center projects in the United States.
Nvidia
revealed that it would sell more than 18,000 of its latest AI chips to Saudi tech firm Humain. AMD will supply chips for the $10 billion project built in both Saudi Arabia and the United States. Details of any restrictions have not yet been revealed, but this access signals alignment on national security concerns. Ahead of the announcements, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signed a strategic economic partnership agreement, which includes several memoranda of understanding on energy, mineral resources, and cooperation in defense, justice, space, and infectious diseases.
On the Senate
floor, Schumer warned that the Chinese regime “inevitably” gets its hands on American chips when other foreign countries do.
“This deal screams ’security risk‘ and ’loophole' as China could be ready to exploit American technology,” Schumer said.
He urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick “to prevent these deals from proceeding until we [are] dead certain that these chips won’t make their way into Chinese government’s hands.”
He also called on the Trump administration to “protect against the offshoring of American AI technology.”
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, had expressed similar concerns.
“The U.S. must lead the world in AI technology—but we must do it securely. The CCP is actively seeking indirect access to our top tech. Deals like this require scrutiny and verifiable guardrails,” he
stated on May 13 on social media platform X, pointing out that his committee raised similar
concerns last July about Microsoft’s partnership with UAE company G42.
Lawmakers have for years called on the executive branch to strengthen enforcement of export controls, the main vehicle by which the United States aims to block the Chinese regime from accessing advanced technologies to modernize its military. Many also routinely warn that the existing export controls are loophole-ridden and often exploited by the regime.
On May 8, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced legislation aimed at
stronger restrictions, and on May 15, a bipartisan group of eight lawmakers
introduced companion legislation in the House.
This all comes as the Trump administration prepares to roll out a new AI diffusion rule. The Commerce Department announced on May 13 that the rule meant to go into effect this week, which was finalized by the previous administration in January, will be replaced. The Biden administration’s rule classified countries in three tiers with different access levels. The Trump administration criticized it as burdensome for companies and unhelpful to diplomatic relations.
At a May 8 congressional
hearing, tech executives told lawmakers that diffusion, or global adoption of the American AI stack over Chinese or other AI products, is key to staying ahead in the race.
White House AI Adviser David Sacks
echoed this sentiment on May 13 during a conversation with Saudi Arabian Communications and Information Technology Minister Abdullah Alswaha, who cheered the rescinding of the previous administration’s diffusion rule.
“How do we win the AI race? The answer is we have to build the biggest partner ecosystem,” he said. “We need our friends, like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and other strategic partners and allies, to want to build on our tech.”
Sacks said the United States has previously taken the opposite approach precisely to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of countries of concern, such as the Chinese regime, but that led to limiting access “to friends and partners.”
“We want to become the standard,” he said.
Following up on his comments via X, Sacks
wrote on May 16, “If the concern is about diversion of advanced semiconductors to China, that’s an important policy objective but one that is easily addressed with a security agreement and a ’trust but verify' approach.”
Earlier the same day, he
wrote, “The only question you need to ask is: does China wish it had made these deals? Yes of course it does. But President Trump got there first and beat them to the punch.”
Several tech
executives have estimated that China may only be months behind the United States in AI, though it is impossible to tell.
China has made major, and rapid, strides in AI development recently, most notably with the launch of DeepSeek, shocking global markets in January.
Huawei recently announced it will
launch its first laptop run on its own operating system, HarmonyOS, which comes with AI digital assistant Celia. The Chinese military-
linked tech giant’s license of Microsoft Windows expired in March, making the use of another operating system a necessity.
The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission highlighted HarmonyOS in its 2024
report, pointing out that AI dominance is about more than just chips. Initially dismissed as a platform that relied almost entirely on third-party software, HarmonyOS is now used on more than 900 million devices globally, and 2.5 million developers are working on HarmonyOS-compatible apps.
Emel Akan and Andrew Moran contributed to this report.
