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This week, chips were on the menu in the White House. When you ask about AI and chips, Saudi Arabia has a huge need for computing power, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) said at a press conference on Tuesday with President Trump, where he floated a potential $50-billion purchase of American microchips. Trumps Commerce Department signed off on exporting 70,000 such advanced microchips made by Nvidia to state-owned AI firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Little wonder why Jensen Huang, Nvidias high-flying CEO, joined a gaggle of tech moguls including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Michael Dell at a dinner honoring the Saudi royal. By the time MBS was on his flight back to Riyadh, he could tout a new data-center partnership with Musks xAI and fleshed-out joint ventures with firms like Amazon and Cisco. Silicon Valleys bevy of deals with the oil-rich Gulf states are central to so-called AI diplomacy: a policy bet that the United States can leverage access to select tech to compete with Chinas broader economic influence. Were leading by a lot on AI, Trump chimed in during the press conference. China would be in second place, but were leading by a lot. In his administration, this has been a constant refrain. David Sacks, his AI czar and a venture capitalist, has argued that chip sales could shift the balance of power in the region, as the White Houses AI diplomacy boxes China out of the Middle East. Yet the reality is that theres no amount of chips that the United States can throw at Saudi Arabia, the UAE or other Gulf states, to persuade them to decouple from China. China-Gulf relations are already deeply entrenched, with Gulf rulers relying on Chinese supply chains to pursue ambitious visions of domestic economic transformation. So while offering access to Nvidia chips might be useful for securing Gulf-state investments in the United States, they are by no means a killer app that can easily re-establish U.S. market share — or geopolitical influence — in the region. Chips-based diplomacy Its easy to see why the oil-rich Arab monarchies have emerged as the key test case for AI diplomacy. Saudi, Emirati, and other Gulf rulers want to transform their current resource wealth into post-oil sources of income and influence, amping up their strategic value to global powers by routing the flow of global data not just oil through the Persian Gulf. Washington, in turn, wants to capture that strategic value and use the Gulf as a beachhead for pushing back against Chinas growing global influence, ensuring that American tech companies build out Gulf compute infrastructure and that Gulf capital, in turn, flows into U.S. markets. Withholding chips from the Gulf states, Sacks argues, would drive [these states] into the arms of China, helping to create a Huawei Belt and Road in the Gulf, a reference to the tech firm. China ties Theres a glaring problem with this argument, though: The building blocks of Gulf rulers AI visions are overwhelmingly manufactured in China. While the Gulf monarchies might downplay economic cooperation with China out of respect for American sensitivities, they are unlikely to go all-in on a second American century short of a monumental shift in what the United States can offer them. Since 2010, the Gulf states Chinese imports have nearly tripled, even as imports from the United States have barely increased with little reason to expect these trends to reverse in the near future, owing to the fallout from Trumps tariffs and Chinas continued manufacturing growth. This extends beyond cheap commercial goods, encompassing important pieces of digital or electrical infrastructure like cell-phone networks and solar panels. The Gulf states have ramped up imports of semi-conductors as part of investments in knowledge-economy industries, data centers, and government e-services. Semiconductor imports to the UAE, for example, grew from around $500 million in annual spending from 2015 to 2019 to over $730 million from 2020 to 2023, with over two-thirds of imports in the latter years sourced from Chinese firms. The UAE also expanded its annual imports of higher-end graphics chips to nearly $1 billion in 2023, with Chinese firms providing over half of that value. Geopolitical annoyance It’s little wonder, then, that the Gulf states have resisted pressure from Washington to pivot from China on matters of economic or even security cooperation. The UAE, for one, has repeatedly annoyed Washington through the closeness of its ties to China, facing allegations of leaking sensitive information about U.S. national-security capabilities to Chinese firms. While state-run AI firm G42 committed to severing ties with Chinese entity Huawei as a condition of partnering with Microsoft in 2024, it did so by selling off its Chinese holdings to yet another state-run Emirati firm overseen by the same Emirati royal. Saudi Arabia, generally more sensitive to U.S. policymakers views on China, has likewise kept its options open with respect to Beijing. Saudi entities continue to partner with Hong Kong-based SenseTime in AI development and deployment, even as the company remains under U.S. sanctions for its role in surveillance of Chinese Uyghurs. This hedging also reflects Gulf rulers concerns about the staying power of present-day U.S. technological advantages. At a time when the United States is floating new restrictions on Chinese students and scholars, the UAE is welcoming them to its Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. The Gulf states will do what they need to keep the door open to U.S. technology including outright bribery but theyll be building compute in partnership with China no matter what the United States does. Can they even build it? Set aside the strategic-competition framing, and more practical questions come up like whether the Gulf states can even build and power these projects. While the UAE has pulled off complex projects before, its proposed 5 GW Stargate campus would be larger than the largest AI data center in the United States and around 50 times larger than the largest such in-country installation. Saudi Arabias proposed 500 MW data-center partnership with Elon Musks xAI is larger than the countrys entire installed capacity at present, and comes even as the monarchy is quietly abandoning its failed megaprojects of yester-year. To be sure, Silicon Valley firms will want these deals all the same, and properly structured such partnerships might shore up U.S. influence alongside Chinas economic influence in the region. But at least for now, theres no level of U.S. direct investment or degree of technology sharing that will get the Gulf states to pivot back away from China. And that means asking hard questions about how much the United States can afford to place critical digital infrastructure on a geopolitical fault line for generations to come.
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E-Commerce
If the football games, boxing matches, and comedy specials werent indication enough that Netflix is making a bold move for the live television market, heres another: Beginning in 2026, it will air live baseball for the first time. Major League Baseball announced a new three-year media rights agreement on Wednesday with NBC, ESPN, and Netflix that could see baseball fans channel surfing to find their games. The shakeups in the agreement mostly see NBC and its parent company, NBCUniversal, commanding a larger share of baseball coverage, picking up several key games and events previously aired by ESPN, including Sunday Night Baseball. And, for the first time in 26 years, NBC will once again air baseball games on its broadcast network. ESPN, meanwhile, opted out of its $550 million rights to Sunday Night Baseball games earlier this year, which it has aired since 1990. But the sports network will continue a nearly-four decade partnership with MLB as it will instead receive rights to a national midweek game package, along with MLB.TV. Finally, streaming giant Netflix is now up to bat with a limited number of special event games, including the T-Mobile Home Run Derby and an Opening Night exclusive. Our new media rights agreements with ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Netflix provide us with a great opportunity to expand our reach to fans through three powerful destinations for live sports, entertainment, and marquee events, MLB Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr. said in a statement. INSIDE BASEBALL If all of this sounds like some inside baseball, it kind-of is: While diehard baseball fans arent likely to be so impacted, the new agreements may help the league expand its reach. But these rights do come at a price, according to reporting by CNBC: MLB is losing about $300 million for the rights to the same games previously paid for by ESPN. Still, the league says that much of its national broadcast rights remain unchanged, as Fox, TBS, and Apple TV will continue to air other games. But the MLB is trying to raise TV revenue at the end of the 2028 season, when the rights agreements announced this week expire, according to CNBC. Theres some optimism about keeping the momentum going in the wake of the World Series last month, which saw an average of 51 million viewers globally when the Los Angeles Dodgers ousted the Toronto Blue Jays, according to the league. And finding new ways to reach potential fans is key, especially as baseball is appealing to a younger demographic. The MLB saw double-digit increases in audiences this year among fans under the age of 17 and between the ages of 18 and 34, it reported..
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E-Commerce
For consumers who are heavy on savings and light on credit history, a new partnership in the world of credit scores could help them lock down a loan. FICO, the company basically synonymous with the credit score, is teaming up with Plaid to bring real-time data showing how much cash someone has on hand to lenders. Plaid, a fintech company that links bank accounts with financial apps, has a lot of visibility into how its customers move cash between bank accounts, payments apps, investment platforms, and just about everything else. Plaids technology runs under the hood across a huge network of 12,000 financial institutions that partner with the fintech startup, which has grown into a key part of the webs financial infrastructure since its founding in 2013. All of those connections make Plaid a no-brainer as a partner for Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO), creator of the gold standard credit score used by most lenders. By partnering with Plaid, FICO will be able to offer a historical picture of money flowing into and out of a consumer’s transaction accounts through Plaids network of finance data, which consumers opt in to through their accounts, the company said in a press release. By bringing together FICOs trusted credit score intelligence with Plaids cash flow data, were creating the foundation for more comprehensive lending decisions, said Julie May, FICO vice president and general manager of B2B scores. This is the beginning of a new chapter in responsible and inclusive lending. The credit score slog Credit scores notoriously require consumers to build up a credit history and demonstrate that they can make timely loan paymentsfactors that outweigh other aspects of a persons financial health, like savings and income. While the system is good business for companies that evaluate and track credit scores, it creates some weird incentives on the consumer side. Its not uncommon for credit score-conscious consumers, in order to build up a credit history, to open a credit card and regularly use it for payments even if they have more than enough cash to handle their expenses. To capture a more complete financial picture for both borrowers and lenders, FICO has been building up an alternative to the traditional credit score for years now. That score, called an UltraFICO, was introduced in 2018. The company frames the UltraFICO score as a more inclusive approach that includes checking, savings, and money market accounts to help borrowers show lenders that they can afford a loan, even without a stellar credit history. FICO describes the UltraFICO score as part of a layered strategy that can help borrowers secure a loan and lenders find new customers beyond the people who would normally qualify. Plaids data will slot naturally into that strategy, offering a broader picture of financial health. The new UltraFICO option will be available through Plaids consumer reporting agency, Plaid Check. Last month, Plaid launched its own alternative credit score, LendScore, which also aims to paint a fuller financial picture for borrowers and lenders by leveraging cash flow insights, income patterns, and financial account connections to reveal a borrowers real-time financial story. Plaids LendScore system is in beta testing now and collecting names for its wait list. High-quality cash flow data is becoming essential for lenders who want a more comprehensive view of a consumers financial picture, said Adam Yoxtheimer, Plaid’s head of partnerships. By combining Plaids real-time connectivity and intelligence with FICO in this next-generation credit score, we are helping lenders make more confident, inclusive credit decisions through a simple and scalable solution.
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E-Commerce
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