China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday boasted of over $4 billion in agricultural contracts signed by China and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the same day President Donald Trump was announcing historic deals in Riyadh.
“Chinese and Saudi enterprises and institutions signed more than 70 cooperation agreements with a total value exceeding $4 billion, covering areas such as green technology application, intelligent equipment output, biological breeding research and development and cross-border supply chains,” the newspaper reported.
The announcements were made by a “sub-council” of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) in Beijing. The CCPIT is a trade organization founded in the 1950s to promote business deals between Chinese companies and foreign corporations.
“China and Saudi Arabia have strong complementarity in the agricultural field, and great potential for cooperation in infrastructure construction, agricultural product production and processing, smart agriculture, green planting and breeding,” said CCPIT Party Secretary Zhang Jianwei.
The Global Times noted that “Saudi Arabia is China’s largest trading partner in the Middle East, and China is also Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner.” Bilateral trade between the two countries has grown to over $107 billion. Chinese companies have a large number of partnerships with Saudi firms, particularly joint projects to build desalination plants.
The arms deal with Saudi Arabia announced by President Trump on Tuesday was worth $142 billion, which is substantially more than the annual trade volume between China and Saudi Arabia, so it is not surprising the Chinese would be eager to take some of the spotlight by announcing a few big Saudi deals of their own.
There would seem to be little reason for Beijing to feel insecure about its relationship with Riyadh, since that relationship has long been based on a very solid foundation: China’s voracious appetite for fossil fuels. The Saudis are China’s second-largest supplier of crude oil after Russia, with exports holding steady at nearly 50 million barrels per month, although China bought more before its economy was weakened by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
China was quick to respond when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the de facto chief executive of Saudi Arabia, announced his “Saudi Vision 2030” plan a decade ago. A key element of the plan was attracting more foreign investment to Saudi Arabia in order to make the economy less dependent on petroleum exports.
One of the riskier plays President Trump made to woo the Saudis away from China was offering a deal that would give the Saudis access to advanced American semiconductor chips. Some analysts are concerned the deal, which has not yet been formally announced, could give China access to banned chips through their close relationship with the Saudis. On the other hand, it could help the U.S. build a decisive lead in the crucial A.I. leadership race.
On Tuesday, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) announced a partnership to provide semiconductors to Humain, an artificial intelligence (A.I.) company owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund.
The two U.S. companies said President Trump’s initiative to open technology exports to Saudi Arabia would give them access to a huge new market for their products, and would also boost America’s efforts to maintain A.I. leadership, because the data centers needed for A.I. projects consume huge amounts of energy, which the Saudis can provide. AMD envisioned a $10 billion chain of powerful data centers “stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States.”
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