ABU DHABI — The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Monday signed a combined $42 billion in sovereign AI compute agreements with three of the largest U.S. cloud providers, formalizing a Gulf push to anchor a regional artificial intelligence build-out that aides on both sides described as the most concrete commercial outcome of the post-war diplomatic flurry that has followed the April 15 Iran-Israel ceasefire.

The deals, announced at a one-day summit hosted at the Qasr Al Watan presidential complex, commit the U.S. providers to construct dedicated “sovereign cloud” regions inside the two Gulf states, with on-soil data residency, locally operated key management and preferential access to next-generation Nvidia and AMD accelerators through the providers’ supply allocations. UAE officials said the agreements would underwrite at least 4.6 gigawatts of new data center capacity in the Emirates by the end of 2028, with a further 3.1 gigawatts to be financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund through its G42-linked AI vehicle.

The summit was attended by senior officials from the UAE Ministry of Investment, the Saudi Communications, Space and Technology Commission, and the executive teams of three of the four largest U.S. hyperscalers. Commerce Secretary Lila Hartwell, who arrived in Abu Dhabi on Sunday night for a separate post-ceasefire bilateral, made a brief appearance, telling reporters that the U.S. government had reviewed the deal structure under existing export control frameworks and “found the arrangements consistent with our policy.”

“This is the natural evolution of a partnership that the war pressure-tested and that the ceasefire opened the door to scale,” said Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE minister of state for artificial intelligence, in remarks following the signing. “The Gulf has the capital and the energy. The United States has the chips, the models and the engineering. The question after the ceasefire was whether we would build that bridge at the speed events demand. Today we did.”

The Abu Dhabi pact is the largest of the agreements, with one U.S. provider committing to roughly $19 billion in a sovereign cloud region centered on Masdar City and Ruwais, drawing on a combination of nuclear baseload from the Barakah complex and dedicated solar capacity now under construction in the Western Region. A second provider signed a $14 billion deal split between Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah, paired with a long-duration power purchase from the Emirates Water and Electricity Co. A third provider’s $9 billion Saudi agreement covers a campus near Riyadh and a smaller facility in NEOM’s Oxagon zone, with PIF acting as co-investor on the physical infrastructure.

For the U.S. providers, the deals offer a politically unencumbered build path at a moment when state legislatures in Sacramento and Albany have moved to slow new hyperscale construction at home. California’s SB 1487, advanced by a Senate committee on Thursday, would impose an 18-month moratorium on new training data centers above 200 megawatts. New York legislators introduced a parallel measure last week. Industry executives have signaled in recent days that capital would shift to jurisdictions willing to permit large interconnections quickly, and Monday’s announcements made the Gulf the most visible alternative.

“The phrase I keep hearing from operators is ‘optionality,’” said Stephanie Park, an analyst at Bernstein who covers cloud infrastructure. “They are not abandoning California or Virginia. They are diversifying away from a single regulatory frame. The Gulf states are offering five gigawatts of permitting certainty, cheap energy and an aligned customer base. That is hard to match in 2026.”

The agreements arrived against the backdrop of an unusually fluid post-war diplomatic environment. The UAE hosted last week’s Doha framework talks on Gulf security architecture and is positioning itself as both a reconstruction financier and a technology hub for a region rebuilding from a conflict that, by Saudi and Emirati estimates, displaced more than four million people and added at least $40 billion to regional infrastructure damage. A senior Emirati official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said the AI build-out was conceived as “the productive twin” of the reconstruction effort. “We want the Gulf to be a place where the next decade of value is created, not just rebuilt,” the official said.

Saudi minister of communications and information technology Abdullah Al-Swaha, in a separate statement, said the kingdom’s $9 billion compute commitment would be complemented by a $4 billion sovereign AI fund focused on Arabic-language foundation models and on industrial applications in petrochemicals, mining and logistics. Al-Swaha said Riyadh expected to add at least 1.2 gigawatts of dedicated training capacity by mid-2027.

U.S. export-control specifics, which have hung over Gulf compute deals since the Biden-era diffusion framework, were addressed in technical annexes that have not been made public. A senior U.S. official briefed on the negotiations said the agreements included “robust” end-use monitoring obligations, restrictions on the resale or sublicensing of accelerators, and a clause permitting Washington to revoke export authorizations in the event of unauthorized transfer to designated countries, a category understood to include Iran, Russia and China. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic details, said the Commerce Department had insisted on “more granular telemetry than any prior overseas deployment.”

Not everyone welcomed the announcements. In Washington, a bipartisan group of senators on the Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, said in a brief joint statement late Monday that the agreements warranted “close congressional review,” citing the dual-use potential of frontier-scale compute and the Gulf states’ diplomatic relationships with Beijing. Aides to Warner said hearings could be scheduled before the end of May.

Critics inside the AI policy community also raised concerns about labor and human-rights conditions at Gulf data centers and about the implications of channeling next-generation accelerators to jurisdictions with limited public oversight. “Sovereignty cuts both ways,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst who has tracked Gulf technology policy for the consultancy Synaptic Frontier. “These are agreements between three corporations and two monarchies. The transparency apparatus that exists in California, however imperfect, does not exist in Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. That matters when you are building this much compute.”

The hyperscaler executives in Abu Dhabi played down those concerns. One CEO, speaking on a closing panel, said the sovereign cloud architecture being deployed in the Gulf included “the same security and audit controls our largest regulated customers in the United States and Europe demand,” and noted that the agreements required local hiring quotas and skills-transfer commitments tied to milestone payments.

Markets received the announcements warmly during European trading hours. Shares in two of the three U.S. providers rose between 0.9 and 1.6 percent in pre-market trading in New York, while Nvidia, which the deals explicitly name as a preferred accelerator supplier through 2027, gained 1.8 percent ahead of the open. AMD, whose MI400-series accelerators are also named in the supply annexes, rose 2.4 percent. Brent crude was little changed near $91 a barrel.

Officials in Abu Dhabi said additional bilateral announcements, including a joint UAE-Saudi training compute pool and a regional AI safety institute to be co-located between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, would be unveiled in the coming weeks.