Prince Tahnoun bin Zayed, Emirati National Security Advisor, during a visit to the White House to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump, on March 18, 2025. (Credit: U.S. Mission to the UAE X account)
$500M, a quiet deal, four days before the second inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025.
At the signing, a royal figure from the United Arab Emirates transfers the colossal sum to the coffers of the cryptocurrency company, mainly owned by the Trump family, World Liberty Financial.
This was a major step in a process that began several months earlier between the brother of the Emirati president, Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who also serves as the country's national security adviser, and the administration of the 47th president of the United States.
The affair, revealed by the Wall Street Journal, is far from a simple business agreement.
It is part of a clear diplomatic timeline whose origins can be traced to the mission MBZ assigned to his brother: to make the United Arab Emirates one of the world's leaders in artificial intelligence (AI).
This mission is well underway, as investments in World Liberty Financial, official visits, and White House dinners paved the way for an agreement last May in which the U.S. administration committed to supplying 500,000 sophisticated AI chips per year to the small Gulf state.
G42, Huawei and Beijing
However, while one-fifth of these chips was intended for G42, a company owned by Tahnoun bin Zayed, the previous U.S. administration strongly suspected the latter of collusion with Beijing and its tech giant, Huawei.
At the center of these suspicions: Peng Xiao, one of Tahnoun bin Zayed’s main advisers and CEO of G42.
Of Chinese origin, he had attracted the attention of the Biden administration, accused by the chairman of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party of supporting companies engaged in "human rights violations."
Washington had, up to that point, refused to sell its chips to the Emirati federation for fear of technology transfers to Beijing.
While some still share these concerns within the current Trump administration, the number was revised downward during negotiations to only 35,000 chips, monitored by several safeguards to ensure the exports do not benefit China or Huawei.
Still, with 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, Tahnoun bin Zayed appointed Peng Xiao, alongside another of his lieutenants, to the board of the company founded in part by the Trump family.
It's a coveted board, counting the children of two central figures in U.S. politics: Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, the respective sons of the president of the world’s top power and the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East.
'There are no conflicts of interest'
While one spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, David Wachsman, asserts that neither the president nor his envoy was involved in the deal, and that "there are no conflicts of interest," it should be noted that several million dollars were transferred to the families of the president and his envoy during the deal.
Of the $250 million advanced at signing, $31 million went to co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Hero, $187 million to the Trump family through two entities it owns, and $31 million to companies owned by the Witkoff family.
It was, in fact, special envoy Steve Witkoff who paved the way by meeting with the Emirati prince in Sardinia this summer aboard his yacht, and in the United Arab Emirates in December 2024.
A week after this official visit, two business entities were formed in Delaware and Abu Dhabi, both named Aryam Investment 1.
The group was behind the $500 million deal, as well as a key investor in an artificial intelligence data center project announced by Trump on his first day in office, estimated at $500 billion.
This earned Tahnoun bin Zayed the honors of the Republican administration.
The powerful prince is no stranger to the Trump family: A deal signed by one of his companies in 2024 had already allowed Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Trump's son-in-law, to raise $1.5 billion.
Trump welcomed the Emirati official in grand style, notably at a White House dinner in March during which Tahnoun promised that his country would invest $1.4 trillion in the United States over 10 years.
There are no doubts for Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “This is corruption,” a threat to U.S. security, she adds, for the benefit of the president’s crypto companies.
According to Bloomberg, these have increased the Trump family's fortune by more than a billion dollars in just one year.
This article was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour.
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