The White House on Tuesday said that President Trump, while in Saudi Arabia, had secured $600 billion in deals with the Saudi government and firms. But the details the White House provided were vague and totaled less than half that number.
And a closer look at the projects the administration provided shows several were already in the works before Mr. Trump took office.
The announcement was made just before Mr. Trump spoke to a gathering of business leaders at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh, where he said the only country hotter than the United States was Saudi Arabia.
“We are rocking,” he said. “The United States is the hottest country, with the exception of your country.”
Before turning toward serious foreign policy matters, including news that he was lifting sanctions on Syria, Mr. Trump meandered through his favorite talking points, bashing his predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and boasting of carrying swing states in the election.
“The Arabian Peninsula — beautiful place, by the way,” he said. “Beautiful place.”
The biggest deal announced was what the administration called “the largest defense sales agreement in history.” The nearly $142 billion agreement will provide the kingdom with state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen American defense industry companies.
The White House also included a commitment from the Saudi company DataVolt to move forward with plans to invest $20 billion in artificial intelligence data centers and energy infrastructure in the United States.
It also touted more than $2 billion in work American firms were performing on Saudi infrastructure projects, among them King Salman International Airport, King Salman Park and Qiddiya City, a massive entertainment complex. The construction company Jacobs announced its involvement in the new Saudi airport project last August. AECOM, likewise, had already won a contract to provide design and project management services for the Qiddiya City project.
The deals announced by the White House totaled around $283 billion — less than half the $600 billion promised by the Saudi crown prince — but the administration said those were “just a few of the many transformative deals secured in Saudi Arabia.” White House officials said more such deals would be forthcoming. (Organizers of the investment forum said that 145 deals were signed, totaling more than $300 billion.)
The White House said the package also included extensive training and support to build the capacity of the Saudi armed forces.
In his remarks at the conference, Mr. Trump hailed the kingdom’s rapid development and claimed the Biden administration had done little for the region.
He also went after Iran, calling it “the biggest and most destructive” force threatening the stability and prosperity of the Middle East, and vowing it would never have a nuclear weapon. At the same time, he said he was offering Iran “a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future,”
“I have never believed in having permanent enemies,” Mr. Trump said.
The American president drew sustained applause when he announced that the United States would lift sanctions against Syria, giving the new government there a chance to rebuild a country devastated by its long civil war.
But there was silence in the crowd after he said it was his “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords, the 2020 deal in which two of its neighbors established diplomatic relations with Israel. The normalization of relations with the Israeli government is deeply unpopular among Saudis, polling shows, and Saudi officials say that recognizing Israel would hinge on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Trump also spoke of the war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas.
“The people of Gaza deserve a much better future,” he said. “But that will or cannot occur as long as their leaders choose to kidnap, torture and target innocent men, women and children for political ends.”
The White House announcement about the deals came hours after Mr. Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman signed a series of agreements between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
They included a letter of intent on future defense capabilities; a memorandum of understanding with the Justice Department; cooperation on space and infectious diseases; and memorandums of understanding on energy and mineral resources.
They also included an agreement between NASA and the Saudi Space Agency for a Saudi CubeSat to fly on NASA’s Artemis II test flight. The CubeSat will measure aspects of space weather at a range of distances from Earth.
The United States and Saudi Arabia also signed an agreement between the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and the Royal Commission for AlUla to support the conservation of the endangered Arabian leopard through the creation of a dedicated exhibit in Washington.
Before signing the agreements, Mr. Trump again encouraged Saudi Arabia to increase its investment in the United States beyond $600 billion over four years. Mr. Trump asked that number to be raised to $1 trillion, though economists say the kingdom does not have such financial resources available.
“We have the biggest business leaders in the world here,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going to walk away with a lot of checks.”
Mr. Trump spoke to those gathered at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, which served as a meeting place for the world’s rich and powerful. He has stocked his White House with billionaires, including Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary; and David O. Sacks, his A.I. and crypto adviser. All spoke at the event.
“How do we win the A.I. race?” Mr. Sacks told those gathered. “The answer is that we have to build the biggest partner ecosystem. We need our friends like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other strategic partners and allies to want to build on our tech.”
The gathering at times felt like a Make America Great Again rally, if one attended by the chief executives of IBM, BlackRock and Citigroup. Many of them already have Saudi ties. One Saudi host joked that guests were “making aviation great again.”
Mohammad Bahareth, 40, a Saudi self-help influencer who runs a private space firm, showed up at the forum wearing a “Trump 2028” hat paired with a red tie. “President Trump always comes as a businessman,” he said. “This is the business mind-set.”
“We want technology,” Mr. Bahareth said. “We want enablement. We want to train our youth. We want the skills to be a superpower in this region.”
Leaders from Amazon, the defense giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and Halliburton were in attendance. So were Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s largest semiconductor company; Alex Karp, the chief executive of the software company Palantir Technologies; and Patrick Soon-Shiong, the businessman who owns The Los Angeles Times.
The president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, also spoke at the event. Saudi Arabia plans to host the World Cup in 2034.
The kingdom has been attempting to transform itself from a country wholly reliant on oil production into a more diverse economy. Saudi officials say that oil used to represent as much as 90 percent of government revenues, but that the figure is now closer to 55 percent.
Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the American investment firm, said Saudi Arabia had made “a statement to the world that we’re going to do it ourselves, that we’re going to build our economy, and we’re going to build our economy in a way that we are taking control.”
Mr. Trump told his advisers he wanted to score pledges of more than $1 trillion during his overseas trip, which will include stops in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita.
Mr. Trump has claimed that, during a visit to Saudi Arabia during his first term in 2017, he secured $450 billion of investments in the United States. But an analysis by Tim Callen, an economist and former International Monetary Fund mission chief to Saudi Arabia, found that this amount did not fully materialize. The export of American goods and services to Saudi Arabia while Mr. Trump was in office from 2017 to 2020 totaled $92 billion, Mr. Callen found, less than the total during President Barack Obama’s second term.
The two other countries on Mr. Trump’s trip are expected to deliver major deals, as well.
