G42 cut Chinese tech ties to win access to advanced U.S. AI chips

G42 was building an AI ecosystem in a region where Chinese cloud and hardware providers were making inroads. The U.S.–China technology contest turned those relationships into a barrier: Washington required safeguards against advanced chips reaching China.

G42 chose to sever ties with Huawei and divest from ByteDance, then publicly aligned its operations and future growth with U.S. and allied technologies under bilateral security frameworks. Saudi Arabia’s Humain made a parallel pledge not to buy Huawei equipment.

The change bought access. In November 2025 the U.S. approved G42 and Humain to buy advanced AI chips equivalent to 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell GB300 processors each. The chips will support the one-gigawatt Stargate UAE facility with OpenAI, Oracle and Nvidia, positioning G42 among the Gulf’s largest non-U.S. AI-compute operators.

Approval to buy computing power equivalent to 35,000 Blackwell GB300 processors, a role in Stargate UAE, and a stronger position as a regional AI-compute hub.

Chinese supplier ties had become a constraint on access to the most powerful U.S. processors.

Divesting from ByteDance and cutting Huawei ties made G42’s alignment legible to U.S. regulators.

Security protocols turned compliance into the condition for a much larger compute platform.

The Stargate UAE project gave the reset a concrete infrastructure and commercial destination.

When access to critical technology depends on trust, a painful supplier and ownership reset can unlock a larger platform than preserving old ties.

G42 entered an exclusive group of Gulf operators cleared for the newest U.S. AI hardware. The approval imposed declared-use, storage and anti-diversion controls, making compliance the continuing price of the compute opportunity.