US-Saudi Investment Forum takes economic ties to greater heights

For Riyadh, the investments serve two purposes. First, they diversify income sources, which further reduces the Saudi economy's dependence on oil. Secondly, it binds the kind of corporate partnerships that bring American technology and knowledge to Saudi Arabia. Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih confirmed that US companies already account for 25% of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Saudi Arabia, with 90% of the new inflows targeting non-oil sectors.

Importance of AI

Of these non-oil sectors, AI is perhaps the most important, and it was the pulse of the forum. The session uniting US and Saudi visions for the industry proved to be the most insightful. Moderated by the Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology, the panel featured Silicon Valley icons Elon Musk (founder of xAI and Tesla) and Jensen Huang (founder of NVIDIA). Together, these two men have a net worth of more than $600bn.

This dialogue was an explicit declaration of a transnational strategic alliance aimed at securing Western leadership in AI. Riyadh's intention is to become the third pillar in the global AI race, alongside Washington and Beijing. This ambition materialised in a landmark agreement between xAI, NVIDIA, and the Saudi company HUMAIN to build a major AI data centre in the country with a capacity of 500 megawatts (MW).

This project is xAI's largest outside the US and represents sovereign infrastructure dedicated to training advanced AI models, including xAI's Grok model. Further ambitious plans were announced in collaboration with AMD, Cisco, and HUMAIN for another data centre project with an ultimate capacity of 1 gigawatt (GW), utilising AMD Instinct MI450 graphics processing units (GPUs), a specialised processor.

Musk thought the combination of AI and humanoid robotics, such as Tesla's Optimus, would herald an era of "abundance" and the "elimination of global poverty" in the next 10–20 years, potentially making everyone "richer than the richest person on Earth today". Both Musk and Huang identified energy and computing power as the critical bottlenecks for AI development. In these areas, Saudi Arabia offers a competitive, with energy 'on tap' and vast tracts of land for data centre construction. Huang eloquently summed up Saudi Arabia's transition "from an oil refinery to an AI refinery".

The AI partnership extends beyond physical infrastructure to encompass human capital and digital sovereignty. Saudi Arabia's digital economy grew by 66% to $132bn in 2024. In 2018, the sector employed 150,000 people. Today, it employs more than 400,000. This rapidly expanding talent pool—supported by academies established by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—lets Saudi Arabia develop large Arabic-language models for more than 400 million people across the Middle East and North Africa, affording the country both cultural influence and digital sovereignty.

Energy and minerals

Other key areas for the forum included civil nuclear energy, critical mineral supply chains, and defence, the latter capped by the signing of the Strategic Defence Agreement between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Trump. The US also formally designated Saudi Arabia a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA), solidifying its privileged status. Military ties will now reach unprecedented levels of coordination and integration, as the states confront shared threats and regional challenges. It also bolsters Saudi Arabia's aim of developing a domestic arms industry, enhancing the operational readiness and independence of its armed forces, and creating jobs.

Another key element of the forum was the Agreement for Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy, an accord that paves the way for the transfer of advanced US nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, including the development of nuclear power plants. This lets big American nuclear firms invest in major projects, again creating highly skilled jobs within the Gulf state.

With this agreement, the Strategic Economic Partnership framework, first signed in Riyadh in May 2025, is now fully completed. The finalisation of this accord realises a core objective announced at the Saudi–US Summit in Riyadh on 13 May. It represents a paradigm shift in the Saudi energy strategy by securing access to cutting-edge civil nuclear capabilities, accelerating the diversification of energy sources and supporting ambitious decarbonisation goals.

On rare earths and uranium, the bilateral signing of the Strategic Framework for Cooperation in Securing Supply Chains for Uranium, Permanent Magnets, and Critical Minerals marked a pivotal moment. Saudi Arabia's estimated mineral wealth is now valued at around $2.5tn after discoveries of rare earth elements and other critical minerals. The Jabal Sayid mine, for instance, is the world's fourth most valuable in estimated reserves of rare earth elements and associated uranium deposits.

This mineral wealth enables Riyadh to fortify Western supply chain security in crucial sectors such as  AI, semiconductors, batteries, and electric vehicles. The Strategic Framework outlines how Saudi Arabia will transition from a raw materials exporter to a global hub for rare-earth processing and magnet manufacturing. The state's abundant energy supply will be of significant benefit in the operations of the energy-intensive mining sector, the expansion of which is a key Vision 2030 priority.

Laying the foundations

What set the forum apart was not merely the landmark commercial deals, but the stark political contradiction laid bare by Trump's candid remarks on skilled immigrant labour. At an event celebrating job-creating investment in the US, Trump had to defend his nuanced position of welcoming qualified foreign workers, particularly in high-tech manufacturing sectors like semiconductors and AI infrastructure. 

With unflinching economic realism, Trump told the audience that the US economy currently lacked the domestic expertise to staff the intricate, multibillion-dollar chip and computer factories being built. In a line that landed like a thunderclap among his political base, Trump said: "You can't come in and open a massive computer chip plant… and think you're going to hire people from the unemployment lines to run it."

There was no choice but to welcome thousands of highly skilled foreigners to train American workers, he said, framing it as a step to Making America Great Again (MAGA, his political mantra). Yet it exposed a paradox at the heart of Trump's economic nationalism, the populist commitment to shielding American jobs from foreign competition colliding directly with the need to maintain technological supremacy by turning to the world's best talent. In a way, it was crossing ideological red lines long sacred to its core supporters. "My poll numbers just went down, but with smart people, they've gone way up," the president joked, wryly.

The central task now is converting the headline $1tn of pledged investment into functioning, on-time projects, such as gigawatt-scale data centres, advanced defence manufacturing, and critical-mineral processing chains. Success hinges on US firms making good on their commitments to localisation and technology transfer, not just on financing. Saudi Arabia will measure institutionalisation by tracking project completion rates, the percentage of value-added activities performed inside the country, and the creation of high-skilled Saudi jobs. For Riyadh, the proof will be in the pudding.

This deep entanglement of economic, technical, and security interests defines a mature partnership built for the long haul. As the Saudi Minister of Investment observed, the relationship is "not only about dollars and cents… but about people," inaugurating a decade of collaboration and a century of shared opportunity. When leaders and executives left the John F. Kennedy Centre on 19 November, they left more than signed agreements. They carried the conviction that Washington and Riyadh had solidified an indispensable alliance that would shape the world of tomorrow.