The royal family in Abu Dhabi had a problem. Their AI firm, G42, wanted American chips, but both the Biden administration and Republicans in Congress feared letting them have any out of concern that the chips would be transferred to China.
The family solved the problem last year, The Wall Street Journal has discovered, by using the simplest solution that businesses can now employ for a policy obstacle: They seem to have made a deal with the Trump family. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family sometimes called the “Spy Sheikh,” purchased a 49 percent share in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto firm, thus sending $187 million to Trump-family-controlled entities. That spring, the Trump administration reversed American policy and approved the AI-chip transfer.
A sitting U.S. president shouldn’t have a business partner. If he did, ideally, that partner would be a U.S. citizen and not an agent of a foreign government. But if the president is going to have a foreign operative as his business partner, ideally that partner would not have a nickname like the Spy Sheikh.
President Trump has generally managed to confine the prolifera
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