UAE Gets Green Light for Megascale AI Campus Loaded With Nvidia Chips

Pivot 5
May 16, 2025

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UAE Wins White House Approval for Megascale AI Campus Stocked With Nvidia Chips

The United States has signed a deal letting the UAE build a 10-square-mile AI campus in Abu Dhabi, billed as the largest outside America. The agreement permits the Gulf state to import up to 500,000 of Nvidia’s top-tier AI chips annually starting in 2025.
US officials say American companies will operate the site and provide cloud services, with names like AWS and Qualcomm already tied to related projects. Washington framed the pact as contingent on the UAE aligning its national-security rules with US standards to block diversion of the technology to China.
Granting unfettered chip access marks a sharp reversal of the Biden-era export controls that had restricted the UAE over Beijing worries. Analysts view the deal as letting Abu Dhabi deepen its tech links with Washington without severing its lucrative trade with China.

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Netflix showcased an AI-powered ad format that blends branded overlays into the visual style of its series and films at its Upfront event. The streamer plans to roll out the immersive ads across its service by the end of this year.
Ads can appear mid-stream or during pause breaks on the ad-supported tier, matching aesthetics of shows like Bridgerton or Stranger Things and offering interactive calls to action. Netflix’s ad tier now reaches 94 million monthly users, more than double last year’s figure.
Amy Reinhard hails the technology as “an entirely new palette” and says the pace of progress is accelerating. Netflix claims viewers focus on mid-roll spots as intently as on the content itself, positioning AI-blended ads as a premium attention asset.

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Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says the fintech's headcount has fallen from about 5,000 to almost 3,000 employees. He attributes the 40% cut to aggressive use of AI tools alongside normal attrition.
The company’s IPO prospectus shows staff dropped from 5,527 at the end of 2022 to 3,422 last December, and the firm claims its AI does the work of 700 customer-service agents. Klarna partnered with OpenAI to launch an AI customer service assistant and even used an AI-generated version of the CEO to announce quarterly results.
Siemiatkowski acknowledged that an all-AI support model produced lower quality service and said Klarna will hire additional human agents in an “Uber type of setup.” Still, the prospectus states headcount is expected to keep falling over time.

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Shanghai’s Synyi AI has opened a trial clinic in Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia where its virtual doctor “Dr. Hua” handles diagnosis and prescriptions. The collaboration with Almoosa Health Group is billed as the world’s first facility to use AI as patients’ initial caregiver.
Dr. Hua recorded an error rate under 0.3% in pre-launch testing, and each treatment plan is double-checked by a human physician who remains onsite for emergencies. The pilot has treated only a few dozen patients so far, with data to be submitted for Saudi approval that Synyi expects within 18 months.
The project highlights the Middle East’s appeal as a testing ground for Chinese health-tech exports alongside moves by Fosun Pharma and XtalPi. Medical professionals remain skeptical, with Singapore’s National University Hospital warning current AI doctors still lag primary practitioners.

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Expedia Group CMO Jochen Koedijk says generative AI now drives insights, bidding systems, and full-funnel content for brands like Expedia, Hotels.com, and VRBO. The team uses OpenAI APIs and ChatGPT to automate image identification and churn out ads, videos, and social creatives at speeds that once took years.
Generative AI gives marketers on-the-fly descriptive analytics, trend-spotting, and lifetime-value modeling without waiting on analysts. Cross-functional squads of creatives, machine-learning scientists, and developers have turned an enormous property catalog into curated video and social content, all moderated by OpenAI tools to safeguard quality.
Koedijk sees ChatGPT-style discovery compressing multi-search trip planning into a brief agent conversation, upending traditional traffic acquisition. He says Expedia is moving beyond SEO and exploring branded agents alongside its One Key loyalty program to keep travelers from inspiration through booking.

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