An Abu Dhabi royal secretly backed a $500-million deal to buy nearly half of a Trump-linked cryptocurrency venture months before the United Arab Emirates secured expanded access to tightly controlled U.S. artificial-intelligence chips, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to company documents and people familiar with the matter cited by the Journal, emissaries tied to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed an agreement on January 16, 2025, for a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial through an entity called Aryam Investment 1.
The first $250 million installment routed $187 million to Trump family entities, the Journal reported, with additional payouts to entities tied to World Liberty co-founders and to the family of Steve Witkoff, a co-founder who became President Trump’s Middle East envoy.
The Journal linked the investment to Tahnoon’s contemporaneous push for U.S. AI chips. After meetings with Trump and senior officials in March 2025, the administration later committed to provide the UAE access to around 500,000 advanced AI chips a year under a framework arrangement, according to the report.
The Aryam deal placed two executives affiliated with Tahnoon’s AI firm G42—Martin Edelman and Peng Xiao—on World Liberty’s board, the newspaper said. World Liberty later publicized a related transaction in which a Tahnoon-led investment firm, MGX, would use World Liberty’s stablecoin for a $2 billion investment into Binance without disclosing overlapping leadership.
Read more at The Wall Street Journal