Trump moves on to Qatar after bounty of deals in Saudi Arabia

U.S. President Donald Trump took his Middle East dealmaking tour to Qatar today after a summit meeting in Riyadh with leaders of the six Gulf states that focused in part on promoting more investment in American military hardware and artificial intelligence.

The visit to Qatar’s capital of Doha continued to generate criticism from Democrats in Congress over Trump’s intention to accept a gift from the Qatari government of a refurbished $400 million plane that would temporarily replace Air Force One.

Arriving in the early afternoon after a short flight from Saudi Arabia, Trump landed at Hamad International Airport in Doha and was met by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim, who was waiting on a yellow carpet to symbolize the desert peninsula’s sandy terrain.

Tomorrow, the President will meet Qatari business leaders for breakfast and greet U.S. soldiers at the Al Udeid U.S. Air Base, before taking off for the UAE.

In his two-day visit to Riyadh, Trump lavished attention on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who said he would try to meet the President’s challenge for investing $1 trillion in the U.S. over the next four years.

At a Saudi-U.S. business conference in Riyadh, Trump and MBS held court with a constellation of billionaires, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio.

From the Saudi business world, the conference featured Muhammad Al Jasser, Chairman of Islamic Development Bank; Nabeel Koshak, CEO of Saudi Venture Capital; Marc Winterhoff, Interim CEO of Lucid; John Pagano, Group CEO of Red Sea Global; Mohammad Abunayyan, Chairman of ACWA Power; Tony Douglas, CEO of Riyadh Air; and Jerry Inzerillo, Group CEO of Diriyah Co.

The Saudi Crown Prince wrapped up the day by bringing Trump for a tour of Diriyah, the ancestral home of the Al Saud royal family, which was led by Inzerillo. The site is undergoing a massive renovation as one of the multibillion megaprojects undertaken by the kingdom, along with the 100-mile long Neom city on the kingdom’s west coast and the Al Mukkab skyscraper cube in Riyadh.

Among the biggest issues discussed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday was the extent to which the Trump administration would lift sanctions on AI semiconductor chips that are being eagerly sought by the Gulf states.

Nvidia, the world’s biggest semiconductor maker, agreed to supply its most advanced AI chips to Saudi Arabia’s Humain, a company created to push that country’s AI infrastructure efforts, Bloomberg reports. Humain will get “several hundred thousand” of Nvidia’s most advanced processors over the next five years, starting with 18,000 of its cutting-edge GB300 Grace Blackwell products and its InfiniBand networking technology.

Huang saw his personal net worth surge to approximately $120 billion over the day, up from $80 billion a year ago, driven by soaring demand for the company’s AI chips that has fueled a sharp rise in its stock, Reuters reports.

AMD, Nvidia’s nearest rival in AI accelerators, will provide chips and software for data centers “stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States” in a $10 billion project, Humain and AMD said.

Also, Saudi VC firm STV launched a $100 million AI fund backed by Google to invest in MENA startups, as part of a broader set of tech-focused U.S.-Saudi agreements announced during President Trump’s visit to Riyadh, Bloomberg reports. And Saudi Arabia agreed to authorize the use of Musk’s Starlink service for aviation and maritime shipping, the SpaceX founder announced.

Neom’s woes accumulate with report detailing cost overruns

Questions continue to pile up about whether Saudi Arabia’s massive Neom development can come close to fulfilling its cosmic ambitions.

A recent tip-off to problems plaguing the sprawling project was a celebrity-packed launch party in October on Neom’s Sindalah resort island, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was a surprise no-show, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Three years late with more than $2 billion in cost overruns, what was supposed to be Neom’s glittering early showpiece was more an active construction site – with Sindalah’s hotels unfinished and high winds disrupting ferries and golf tee-offs, the Journal recounts. Weeks later, Neom CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr was out of a job.

“After spending more than $50 billion, the Crown Prince’s sci-fi-inspired dreams – an arid-mountain ski resort, a floating business district, and The Line, the 106-mile-long pair of Empire State Building-height skyscrapers that is Neom’s centerpiece – have collided with reality,” the newspaper writes.

Evidence of the project’s epic troubles comes from a 100-page internal audit that was presented to members of Neom’s board last spring and reviewed by the Journal.

The report estimates the capital expenditure required to build Neom to its “end-state” by 2080 at $8.8 trillion – more than 25 times the annual Saudi budget – and $370 billion for its first phase by 2035. It said the audit found “evidence of deliberate manipulation” of finances by “certain members of management.”

At Neom’s Trojena project, which will be the Gulf’s first outdoor ski resort and official site for the 2029 Asian Winter Games if it’s built by then, the report show cost overruns of more than $10 billion.

A Neom spokeswoman said the Journal was “incorrectly interpreting” and misrepresenting figures in the report, adding that the project “remains on track, demonstrating tangible progress.”

NEOM replaces CEO amid megaproject’s delays, rising costs

Saudi Arabia’s banner NEOM project is getting a management shake-up.

The Public Investment Fund-owned company running the kingdom’s $500 billion development along the Red Sea coast announced the departure on Tuesday of CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr.

The move follows months of reports on rising costs and delays for the megaproject, which aims to build a 110-mile linear city called The Line for 9 million people and has been a centerpiece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 blueprint for modernizing the Saudi economy.

Aiman al-Mudaifer, the head of PIF’s Local Real Estate Division since 2018, was named as NEOM’s acting CEO. “As NEOM enters a new phase of delivery, this new leadership will ensure operational continuity, agility and efficiency to match the overall vision and objectives of the project,” the company said in a statement.

In his role at PIF, Al-Mudaifer oversees all local real estate investments and infrastructure projects, and he is a board member of several prominent companies in the kingdom.

While changing seats at the top, NEOM also announced on Tuesday that it has hired three international consultants for city planning, design and engineering roles connected to The Line. The firms are Austria’s Delugan Missl Associate Architects, San Francisco-based Gensler and Mott MacDonald in the U.K.

Costs for Saudi Arabia’s mega-projects keep getting higher

The price tag keeps on getting higher for Saudi Arabia’s ambitious national building program – from the futuristic city of Neom in the west to the Qiddiya cluster of theaters, theme parks and a Formula 1 track in Riyadh.

Tallying the expenditures indicated for all the property, infrastructure and tourism projects that the kingdom has started over the past eight years, Knight Frank, the London-based real estate consulting firm, estimates the total cost at $1.3 trillion, up 4% from a year ago.

About $164 billion worth of real estate contracts have been awarded since 2016, when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled his Vision 2030 strategy to wean the country off its dependence on oil and unleash underdeveloped industries such as mining, manufacturing, tourism and entertainment, Knight Frank said in a report.

The largest chunk of that money – $28.7 billion – has gone to Neom, with heavy spending on the development within it known as The Line, a pair of mirrored towers expected to eventually span more than 105 miles through the desert. Bloomberg reports.

Other banner projects include establishing the National Housing Co. with $12 billion to build more than 1 million homes, the development of Riyadh’s Diriyah Gate section at $9 billion and the entertainment city of Qiddiya in the capital with almost $7 billion.

Neom faces 20% budget cut amid continued drop in Saudi oil prices

Neom, the flagship mega-project of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic roadmap, is facing budget cuts.

The development along the Red Sea coast is expected to be allocated 20% less than its targeted budget for this year, Bloomberg reports.

The revision comes as the kingdom reconciles lower-than-expected oil prices and foreign investment that has it on track for at least three more years of projected national budget deficits.

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan has previously said the eight-year-old Vision 2030 plan may face delays because the kingdom needs to be careful about “overheating” the economy – which may cause inflation to rise. 

“If you don’t allow your economy to catch up with your projects, basically what will happen is you’ll import a lot more,” Al-Jadaan said at the Qatar Economic Forum in May.

As a result, Saudi Arabia could lack the factories and other capacity needed to support its plans. “So giving it more time is actually wise,” he said.

Modifying the vision is not necessarily a bad sign, analysts told Bloomberg, echoing the Finance Minister’s comments. The “rightsizing” of projects is a sign the kingdom is maturing, according to Goldman Sachs’ MENA Economist, Farouk Soussa. 

“What they’re doing in terms of adjusting these projects gives us a lot of comfort,” Soussa said. “They’re basically saying they’re not going to go for broke or bet the house on any one particular thing. If it’s possible, they’ll do it. If not, they won’t. They’re being quite sensible.”