Live from Riyadh: insider breakdown of the Saudi-US tech summit and Syria sanctions lift

the traditional in the traditional Oh, we were expecting a a suit. We were expecting more pageantry. Yeah. No, no th from me today, boys. But, uh, I am calling in from an undisclosed location in Saudi. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. You sound great. Sound great. You sound great. Loud and clear. Give us the breakdown.

Why are you there? What's going on? What's the mood on the ground? Yeah. So, uh, I'm here mostly just to see friends. Okay.

Um, but uh, but beyond that, there was an event today uh where there was a US delegation, President Trump was there, uh, the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman was obviously there and a slew of top tech leaders from the US also came. We had Jensen Wong, Elon Musk, uh, etc. , etc. , you know, all the big names.

You can look them up online. Yeah. Can we hear? Yeah. Yeah. And this. Um, in terms of the big the big headlines, look, you guys can look them up. Uh, the big ones are 600 million in new uh new committed capital. Uh, sorry, 600 billion in new Yeah, 600 billion new committed capital.

But I don't want to talk about that at all. What is the most interesting thing from today is the fact that sanctions on Syria have finally been lifted. Now, I know between the three of us, every time we get together, it's like, when are we finally going to be able to enter the Syrian market?

Well, boys, that day is today. Yeah, this is the day everybody's been waiting for. We should start distributing the show there for sure. Yeah. No, 100%. A lot of people don't realize, look, Syria, after the civil war started in 2011, um, our companies have just not really been able to serve customers there.

So, the Syrians don't really know the joy of US big tech yet. and uh you know they miss the whole web 2. 0 mobile development.

Um so most of the groups that are servicing them are uh from the Chinese sphere versus the American sphere and I am beyond excited for the new crop of talented founders that are going to descend on the Syrian country to spread them the joys of American big tech.

So you know uh if anyone is watching and is going to be launching any number of companies in Syria, my DMs are open. I could not be more excited. Very cool. Wow. 23 million people in Syria. Go get them future customers. 23 million people.

They've had double digit inflation for like the past decade, which means that they are a prime market for stable coin adoption. So every stable coin neo bank needs to be descending into Syria and seeing how quickly they can dollarize the entire country.

If anybody is using the Syrian pound in 5 years instead of US dollars on blockchains, we've just massively screwed up as an industry. So please request for startups. We are looking to fund. That's very cool. What about artificial intelligence? Uh Nvidia launched some stuff.

Have you been hearing any rumblings about AI stuff going on? Yeah, look, the fact that Jensen was here today on the main stage shows that uh we are likely softening some of the restrictions on being able to export GPUs to the kingdom and other parts of the Middle East.

Um I might have the numbers off, but I think there was an announcement that like a purchase order of 18,000 GPUs has just been approved for the kingdom. Um if you're listening and that sounds small, not enough to build, you know, a hyperscaler, a massive cluster, you're correct. But this is clearly the first of many.

The entire region is have rapidly searching to turn their uh you know, petrol uh petrol- based capital into you know token based capital in the future. Um so expect expect continued investment from the region trying to diversify out of uh their kind of one main industry via AI just for extra context.

So, Humane, the AI subsidiary of the PIF, is going to be purchasing hundreds of thousands of advanced GPUs over the next five years. So, starting with I think the number that that you said 18,000 and and scaling. Yeah. And the first plant is I think half a gigawatt, right? Something like that.

What's your take on uh why do you think that we started calling data centers AI factories? Do you have a take there? Does it just sound cooler? Yeah, it lowers your cost of capital. Yeah. And that's that's the most important thing that anybody can be focused on at any given point. Yeah. What what is the word on energy?

Obviously with AI training, it makes so much sense to put big data centers there. Um but at the same time, they're trying to get away from the hey, we have a whole ton of free energy because we have so much oil. Uh there's also a lot of sunlight, so maybe there's solar in the future.

what are the hot energy uh sectors that people are looking at? Yeah, so a lot of people are uh with regard to energy talking about a potential nuclear deal. Um while there is an abundance of oil in the kingdom, um burning oil to power power plants is not necessarily the most efficient use of oil.

Um you know, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but if you look at the amount of oil that is burnt in order to air condition all the buildings in the kingdom, it's like an exorbitant expense.

Um so some some Gulf states uh are slightly more advantage in that they have larger deposits of natural gas versus uh crude or shale um which is just you know it's more more efficient in terms of converting into energy. And with regard to solar, solar in uh the desert has not really taken off as much.

Um because my understanding is there's a lot of wear and tear that comes from the sand. Um and that you need to build a series of protections and the elements are not necessarily kind and you know 130 degree Fahrenheit weather as sand rapidly batters them. So we'll see what happens.

But yeah, obviously um there's been a bunch of companies that are super interesting like Cruso. I might be mispronouncing that. They're doing things like capturing excess flare, using that to generate energy at first to do crypto mining and now to run data centers.

So, expect there to be a lot more, as Jordy put it, AI factories coming out of the region. Um, and there's a massive focus on on renewables and alternative sources as well to power these things. Um, because people would rather sell their oil versus use them to, you know, uh, spin a water turbine. Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh, do you think you or Jensen go to more conferences? I really don't go to that many conferences, guys. You know, I'm about to hit my quota for the year and then I will retreat to a dark room and sit on my laptop for the next nine months. Yeah, you do it right, though. You do it right.

You go to you go to just the right ones. I uh we've been just like not not even intentionally, but paying attention to Jensen's travel schedule and uh he's at a new conference pretty much every single day. But um what's the rest of the mood around crypto broadly?

Is there a push for Saudi Arabia to build a position in Bitcoin, kind of a Bitcoin national reserve from their public investment fund? Are they into Ethereum, Salana?

Is there is there is there even a thesis from the from the sovereign wealth fund around crypto or is it kind of just general handwaving around, hey, we want crypto to be friendly generally? Yeah, so the holdings of PIF are public or PIF, the public investment fund of the kingdom.

Um as of now there's no crypto holdings in that uh except via you know funds that they're invested in downstream. Um in terms of uh if it is going to emerge as a crypto hub that is still yet to be seen crypto is largely legal in Saudi.

What is interesting though is uh when you look at countries that have been super friendly to crypto in the region mainly the UAE right there's a lot in Abu Dhabi there's quite a bit in Dubai. the customers that they tend to cater are not uh born Emiratis, right?

The number of of Emirati citizens that necessarily will make use of crypto products in terms of giving them access to banking is fairly low, right? These are nations that are mostly staffed by uh uh immigrants um you know, expats that are choosing to live there.

Um but when you look at Saudi even though crypto is legal here there are some studies that show uh that in terms of Gulf region it has the highest penetration from a individual user adoption space um just how many individuals are holding the coins.

So I think that as uh the regulatory framework fleshes out a little bit and as um you know more and more voices inside of uh the ministry of finance and the central bank here uh grow louder um we should expect to see uh a softening of the rules and then the end state of that is probably a pretty robust uh environment specifically in the kingdom.

Um but re remember the people that can benefit from crypto the most are regions that have you know high levels of inflation, low levels of banking, uh highly mobile first in terms of um you know payment infrastructure and things like that. And that doesn't necessarily describe all the Gulf States the best.

So you know jury is still out on how much and how quickly penetration will come outside of just like investment speculation which of course you hear rumors about tons of family offices here building massive positions but it's just very hard to validate that. Yeah.

with with w with with the new 300 billion 600 billion investment. Is that one of those things where the investment was already going to happen and they're tagging it for this press release or what is the structure? Is there any is there any clarity on like the structure of that deal?

Is that just investment dollars flowing into American investment funds or specific buying of of American goods? Do you have any clarity on what what what we're going to expect here?

I haven't really broken it down yet, but I I think the right way to think about it is it's going to be a lot of infrastructure investments and a lot of purchasing of American goods. Sure. Right.

So, when Jord's talking about the hundreds of thousands of GPUs that are going to be acquired, that's, you know, the pool of capital that that's that where that's going to be coming from. Um, but no, I mean, they they specified they want to invest in energy infrastructure. They want to invest in data centers.

They want to invest in, you know, ports and just anything.

So, I mean, it could even be like more oil rigs in the in the short term as they, you know, they're they're moving away from oil, but, you know, they're obviously still producing a lot of it and American companies have kind of a dominant uh position in the, you know, oil and gas infrastructure market.

So, they might be buying for that. Totally. So, we'll see. Also, part of that is a massive defense spending bill or a defense spending agreement. I think it was 143 billion that they committed.

And um you know just socially talking with some of the people from the Ministry of Defense that you ran into at the conference um they were like oh my god have you heard of this company called Seronic? Have you heard of this company called Andreal?

They're really gung-ho on some of the non-prime upstarts coming out of the states. And um yeah I I had like three different guys from the Ministry of uh defense be like hey if you meet any founders building interesting new defense companies refer them to us. We want to potentially pilot them.

We want to potentially invest in them if we want to make a purchase contract. So yeah, it's an exciting time for sure. I would like to see somebody with a Daytona SP3 using it as a launchpad for a Roadrunner. So like you're driving the Daytona, launching the Roadrunner off the back.

Uh I mean in terms of like early stage founders, like how early is too early to start engaging with someone like as senior as like a Ministry of Defense official? I feel like you need to have a product that can be demoed.

But when we talked to the secretary of the army, uh his message was very much like we want to hear from startups even at the early stage. We have a proving ground. You can come test here. We want to work with Silicon Valley.

That seems like it's certainly a vibe shift in America, but it sounds like that's happening over in Saudi Arabia as well. Absolutely.

I mean, I I mainly do not focus on defense, so I don't want to say anything too out of turn, but I think post the Ukraine Russia conflict, people saw how important it is to have the most up-to-date equipment for the battlefield.

Um, so in the same way that a lot of companies immediately went over to Ukraine and Russia or immediately went over to Israel following October 7th, um, there's probably an increased appetite to try new things and see where it goes. And, uh, if you have a prototype, it's probably better than not having a prototype.

But if you have good contacts, it probably is a good idea to get in touch earlier rather than later. Yeah, I think oftentimes a conversation start, but no purchase activity can actually happen until the US has actually Yeah. basically approved it and said, "This works, we'll buy it. Now you can export it to allies.

" Anyways, we don't need to get into what's the mood around the trade war generally? It feels like we're almost in like post trade war discourse. It's a distant memory at this point after uh Sunday and Monday, but are people still thinking about tariffs or has the conversation just completely moved on?

Yeah, the the day opened with tariff conversations. So Scott Bent uh started the day um and it was very calming uh you know he he he got up he talked about the negotiations with his Chinese counterparties.

Um he made some very interesting points around how while uh President Trump and uh Xi had a very strong relationship. Um some of the people more junior um in the CCP perhaps uh did not share his warm feelings towards our president.

Um so he he mentioned that a lot of uh the talks in Switzerland were about um you know showcasing and building favor with some of the you know uh second and tertiary level folks within the Chinese government. Um and and came out and was very much uh we don't want to trigger an embargo on Chinese goods.

We don't want to trigger a double embargo. Um, so the tariff rates came down and and talked about a number of other countries he was going to negotiate with and it was very much a non-escalatory tone and I don't think it's a surprise at all that the uh, you know, US delegation chose to start the day out that way.

Um, so so no tariffs weren't really talked about after that because Besson kind of uh, kept everybody at ease. We'll see how much that remains and if we continue to uh, lay off and have more 90-day reprieves and more agreements negotiated or if you know tomorrow things ramp back up again.

But for now, I think people were pretty pretty calm. Very cool. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time. I know there very clearly thanks for just throwing on the suit just to pop on. Yeah, just for us. Yeah. Thanks for throwing every uh let me tell you about linear.

Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Let me get some soundboard Jordy. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product road map. The standard for product development.

It is the backbone of the global economy of the global economy of the global economy. Many people are calling just considering that big tech is you know this really goes on for a long time. Uh well thank you for supporting Impulse Labs coming in the studios.

Uh he's talking about stoves but also trade tariffs manufacturing. I want to ask him about what it takes to build a BYD in America and I want to know the history of BYD, what he's learning from that company and I also want to get him to sign up for Numeral because I want him to put his sales tax on autopilot.

I want him to spend less than five per month on sales tax compliance. But Sam, welcome to the studio. How are you doing, Sam? Um, hopefully we have Welcome. Welcome. Welcome, Sam. It's great to have you. Good to have you. How did you uh how'd you sleep last night?