Yahoo Finance

President Trump's four day trip to the Middle East kicking off in Saudi Arabia with one big message. If you invest in the U.S., you'll find Washington at your door. Here with more on the president's trip to Saudi Arabia. We've got Yahoo! Finance senior columnist Rick Newman. Rick, what have you been tracking? What do we know so far about the political implications and what President Trump is looking for here?

This is not your normal presidential overseas trip, uh, it's not really about diplomacy. Um, Trump is not going to be doing too much, apparently, uh, trying to get a peace deal in Israel, for example. Um, he he's going over there, I mean, to make deals. That's that's what he says he wants to do. So he's going to hit three countries: Saudi Arabia, uh, Qatar, and the UAE. And those are all countries that are trying to diversify diversify away from oil. They've obviously got tons of money, uh, they have sovereign wealth funds, um, and they're looking to invest. So this is this is all about artificial intelligence, um, selling them technology they need to build data centers, uh, develop artificial intelligence, and things like that. So that list of CEOs includes mostly, uh, tech people and defense people. So that's that's going to be the focus here: selling U.S. uh, high-end technology chips and other things relating to data centers, and, as usual, weapons, um, to these countries that have a lot of money to spend.

Yeah, Rick, talk to me about that. There's the level of CEOs, especially from those big tech companies that are in the room. We've already got this news of that AI chips deal, uh, getting a little bit easier access to those chips from Saudi Arabia. Any information about any other potential deals that we could see by end of day today?

Um, who knows? Um, and you know, the thing with all these deals that Trump announces, I mean, in many cases, these these are deals that have already been announced. And they've sort of been repackaged, so you have you have to look out for that. Um, also, I mean, obviously, um, CEOs all CEOs want to be in the room. I mean, this is different from Trump's first presidential term. Uh, a lot of these, uh, CEOs were at odds with Trump during his first term. And we've seen many of them just making peace with Trump whatever it takes. I mean, you know, think about the tech CEOs who paid $1 million for his, uh, inauguration, uh, parade, and showed up at the stand when he was sworn in. So these, um, business leaders have decided it's better to be inside Trump's orbit than outside. And maybe they're going to get a payday today.