If you thought “America First” meant jobs, tech, and national security staying on U.S. soil, then congratulations — you just got played. Again.
On his latest Middle East tour, Donald Trump handed out America’s crown jewels of artificial intelligence like party favors at a petro-dictator’s birthday bash. Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell chips? Gone. AMD? Hooked for $10 billion more. Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and Alphabet? All lined up to build data centers not in Detroit or Dallas — but in the United Arab Emirates. In total, more than $100 billion in American hardware and know-how is now headed straight into the desert.
And what do we get in return? Jack squat.
No new American jobs. No factories on U.S. soil. No union welders or line workers clocking in. The 10-square-mile “AI Campus” being built in Abu Dhabi — the so-called crown jewel of this deal — won’t employ Americans, it’ll run on cheap foreign labor bussed in from poorer countries like it’s just another Gulf construction project.
And don’t be fooled — this isn’t just about cloud storage and shiny new servers. These chips are powerful enough to train the next generation of autonomous weapons, mass surveillance systems, deepfake propaganda, and cyberwarfare tools. The same AI we’re handing over can be used to undermine democratic movements, spread disinformation at industrial scale, and destabilize governments — including ours.
Worse yet, the chips we’re exporting — the very brains behind these systems — are going to G42, a company with a documented history of ties to Huawei and Chinese intelligence networks. They say they’ve severed those connections. Maybe. But they’re still run by Tahnoun bin Zayed, the UAE president’s brother and national security overlord. This isn’t a private tech startup — it’s a velvet-gloved extension of an authoritarian regime.
Trump didn’t just tear up export restrictions — he gift-wrapped the future of warfare and called it a jobs plan.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t diplomacy. This is a strategic surrender. America’s most powerful technology is now in the hands of a monarchy that doesn’t answer to voters, doesn’t answer to Congress, and won’t hesitate to use these tools to tighten their grip on power — and challenge the West’s.
Bottom Line: Corporate America gets richer. Strategic tech flows abroad. American workers get nothing.
And Trump, once again, proves “America First” was just a bumper sticker — sold to voters while the product ships overseas.