Microsoft is the first company to be granted an export license by the Trump administration, allowing the company to ship Nvidia GPUs to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In a blog post announcing a wider $7.9 billion investment package in the UAE, Microsoft President Brad Smith said that Microsoft secured the license in September, enabling the company to ship “the equivalent of 60,400 additional A100 chips, in this instance involving Nvidia’s even more advanced GB300 GPUs.”

The hyperscaler was one of a limited number of companies to be granted export licenses under the previous Biden administration, which saw it ship the equivalent of 21,500 Nvidia A100 chips, through a combination of A100s, H100s, and H200s.

“In no small measure, this is because of the substantial work we did to meet the strong cybersecurity, national security, and other technology conditions required by these licenses,“ Smith said.

Smith did not state whether or not Microsoft has yet shipped any of the chips permitted under the license granted by the Trump administration.

In early October, it was reported that the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had issued Nvidia with export licenses for chips headed for the UAE after it emerged that a deal struck in May between the UAE and the US for the export of several hundred thousand Nvidia chips was facing delays, frustrating members of the Trump administration and senior executives at the chip giant, including CEO Jensen Huang.

The May agreement saw Saudi Arabian AI venture Humain announce it had bought 18,000 Nvidia GB300 chips to build up to 500MW of data centers in the Gulf country, with “several hundred thousand” more expected to make their way to the region in the next five years. The company also announced a similar deal with rival chipmaker AMD to supply another 500MW worth of data centers across the US and Saudi Arabia, as well as partnerships with Amazon Web Services.

However, over the weekend, President Trump told journalists that nobody “other than the United States” will have access to Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell GPUs. While the comments likely relate to the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China, they caused confusion about the status of deals signed between Nvidia and foreign governments for Blackwell deployments, which, alongside the UAE, include Europe and South Korea.