TSMC has reportedly held discussions with the Trump administration regarding the possibility of building a semiconductor fab in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Per a report from Bloomberg, the company has held multiple meetings with US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and officials from UAE state-owned investment firm MGX.

While few details about the proposed facility are known, the report said if it were to go ahead, the site would be similar in both size and scale to the fab TSMC is currently building in Arizona.

However, a number of concerns have been raised by the Trump administration, including the desire for a level of US control over the site and the potential negative impact it could have on the Arizona facility, particularly as TSMC would likely have to bring in workers to the UAE site from other locations. Currently there is a lack of qualified workers in the Gulf State to build and run the fab.

Issues of national security have also reportedly been discussed, given the influence of China and Iran on the region.

The previous Biden administration banned exports of Nvidia and AMD's latest GPUs to some countries in the Middle East amid accusations that the UAE had become a potential “transshipment point” used by Russia to evade sanctions and the country’s deepening ties with China. According to a report from the American Enterprise Institute, in the first half of 2023, shipments of chips from China accounted for 88 percent of the chips acquired by Russia.

The news comes several weeks after the launch of Humain, a state-owned AI investor backed by the Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which announced a slew of data center deals with AMD, Nvidia, AWS, and Groq during President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

Under the terms of those deals, Humain will buy 18,000 Nvidia GB300 chips with "several hundred thousand" more on the way, that it was partnering with AWS for a $5bn 'AI Zone,' signed a deal with AMD for 500MW of compute, and deployed Groq chips for inference.

The company has also signed MoUs with Qualcomm and Cisco and announced a 5GW data center campus, with the project slated for construction by Emirati AI company G42, a proportion of which will house a local Stargate cluster, backed by Oracle and SoftBank.