Image: Reuters
The United Arab Emirates plans to increase the value of its energy investments in the United States to $440bn in the next decade, it said on Friday, boosting US President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure major business deals on a Gulf tour.
The wealthy oil power’s strategy was announced during a presentation by Sultan Al Jaber, Abu Dhabi oil giant ADNOC’s chief executive, to Trump during the last stage of his regional trip that has drawn huge financial commitments from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The enterprise value of UAE investments in the US energy sector will be boosted to $440bn by 2035 from $70bn now, Al Jaber told Trump, adding US energy firms will also invest in the UAE.
“Our partners have committed new investments worth $60bn in upstream oil and gas, as well as new and unconventional opportunities,” Al Jaber said in front of a slide showing projects in the UAE under the logos of US companies ExxonMobil, Oxy and EOG Resources.
Already in March, when senior UAE officials met Trump, the UAE had committed to a 10-year, $1.4tn investment framework in the United States to deepen reciprocal ties.
The framework will “substantially increase the UAE’s existing investments in the US economy” in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, energy, and manufacturing, the White House said in a statement.
‘GREAT PROGRESS’
“We’re making great progress for the $1.4tn that UAE has announced it intends to spend in the United States,” Trump said in Abu Dhabi, his last stop on a Gulf tour that has focused on investment deals, not security crises in the Middle East, including Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Yesterday the two countries also agreed to create a path for UAE to buy some of the world’s most advanced AI semiconductors from American companies, a very big contract.”
Trump said the deal will generate billions of dollars in business and accelerate efforts by the UAE, an oil power and regional economic power, to become a major player in artificial intelligence.
“And I read where – the oil and gas and all is great but you’re going to have equally big, and maybe even bigger – at some point, you’ll be surpassing it with AI and other businesses, so that’s a great tribute to the job you’ve done here,” Trump told UAE officials on Friday during his visit.
XRG, the international investment arm of ADNOC, is seeking to make a significant investment in US natural gas, Al Jaber, who is also XRG’s executive chairman and minister of industry and advanced technology, has said.
ADNOC’s stakes in Next Decade’s Rio Grande LNG export facility and a planned ExxonMobil hydrogen plant – both in Texas – were transferred to XRG, which was set up last year and which ADNOC has said has $80bn in assets. It has a mandate to pursue global deals in chemicals, natural gas and renewables.
Mubadala Energy, an arm of Abu Dhabi’s second largest sovereign wealth fund, last month signed a deal with US firm Kimmeridge that will give it stakes in US gas assets.
