Saudi Arabia, once shunned, has corporate titans swooning for deals
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 13 hours ago
- 3 min read
By LAUREN HIRSCH
For years, U.S. executives have traveled to Saudi Arabia in hopes of tapping its deep wealth to fund their businesses and investment firms. But those visits were sometimes done stealthily and often with little fanfare, particularly after agents of the kingdom killed Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Saudi critic, in 2018.
But earlier this week, some of America’s most prominent executives strolled the red-carpeted interior of the Kennedy Center in Washington reveling in all things Saudi.
At an Wednesday event billed as the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, the corporate leaders mingling and applauding speeches by President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman included Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce; Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia; Dina Powell, vice chair of BDT & MSD Partners and a former Goldman Sachs executive; and Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.
For many, the reasons they came to the event were simple.
“We can do deals here.” John Kelly, the chief technology officer of Global AI, said. “We can develop partnerships. Like, real quick, very fast, in the course of two days — dinner, breakfast meetings, side meetings.”
Kelly summed up the underpinnings of the transactional flurry: Saudi Arabia “needs this technology, and we need energy, and we need our technology to go beyond the United States.” That dynamic has made Nvidia, which makes powerful computer chips that are essential to AI projects, a powerful lever in global negotiations.
Elon Musk announced from the stage with Huang that his xAI, which makes the Grok chatbot, and Nvidia would team up with the state-backed Saudi company Humain to build a data center in the kingdom. The center is expected to consume as much as 500 megawatts of electricity.
“You’ve done such a good job,” Trump said to Huang on Wednesday as he asked the executive to stand for the room to applaud. Executives who could not fit in the Kennedy Center auditorium watched the president on screens in the lobby.
The Ministry of Investment of Saudi Arabia said in a release Wednesday that the kingdom and the United States had pledged than $575 billion in deals and agreements — though that does not mean those deals will necessarily come to fruition.
Among the announcements, Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, said from the stage that his private equity firm had agreed to develop a data center in Saudi Arabia with Humain. Humain also struck deals with Global AI, AMD and Cisco.
Trump had made it clear at a White House news conference Tuesday that Khashoggi’s murder was not a concern, and he chided a reporter for asking Crown Prince Mohammed about it. U.S. intelligence agencies have said the killing was carried out on the prince’s orders.
The Saudi minister of investment, Khalid al-Falih, said in an interview on the sideline of the Kennedy Center event that it and the state dinner honoring the crown prince Tuesday revealed that the U.S.-Saudi relationship “is rising to new levels.” It is one, he said, that is also being “illustrated openly.”
Trump’s family has its own business ties to the kingdom. Among them: The Saudi sovereign wealth fund is the lead investor, alongside Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, in a $55 billion deal for the video game company Electronic Arts.
The shift from hushed deals to boldly pledged allegiances was underlined by the attendees at the White House dinner Tuesday. Mingling alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook and soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Global.
Ellison is working on a bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that would create a media colossus and a giant in the news industry combining CNN and CBS News. That bid is fully backstopped by his father, Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle — but the Saudis could ultimately participate in the deal.
A photo from the black-tie dinner featured David Ellison with Salesforce’s Benioff and investor Michael Dell. On Wednesday, Benioff posted the photo on social media with the message, “The enterprise software guys are in the house.”