Trump just pull a stunt with Saudi Arabia. He first tried to "convince" them to reduce the oil price to hurt Russia. In the following negotiations the oil price was no longer mentioned but MBS promised to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over 4 years:
Since the Stargate Initiative is a private sector deal, this may have been a perfect shakedown of Saudi Arabia. SA has always been irrationally attracted to "AI", so perhaps it was easy. I mean that part of the $600 billion will go to "AI".
MBS does need to pay lip service to the US, but he's better off investing in Eurasia IMO, and/or in SA itself. US assets are incredibly overpriced right now. I'm sure he understands this, so lip service will be paid, dances with sabers will be conducted, US diplomats will be pacified, but in the end SA will act in its own interests.
One only needs to look as far back as the first Trump administration to see that Trump only cares about the announcement and doesn’t care about what’s actually done.
And if you don’t want to look that far just lookup what his #1 donor Musk said…there is no actual $500Bn.
Yeah - Musk claims SoftBank "only" has $10B available for this atm.
There was an amusing interview with MSFT CEO Satya Nadella at Davos where he was asked about this, and his response was "I don't know, but I know I'm good for my $80B [that I'm investing to expand Azure]".
https://fortune.com/2025/01/23/saudi-crown-prince-mbs-trump-...
Since the Stargate Initiative is a private sector deal, this may have been a perfect shakedown of Saudi Arabia. SA has always been irrationally attracted to "AI", so perhaps it was easy. I mean that part of the $600 billion will go to "AI".