Saudi Crown Prince MBS will head to White House on Nov. 18 for official working visit

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will head to the White House for an official working visit on November 18, a White House official said on Monday.

MBS will meet with President Donald Trump, who made Saudi Arabia his first foreign destination during both his first and second terms in office.

Several agreements are expected to be discussed during the meeting, including defense and technology deals, notably in the semiconductor sector. Bilateral ties between Washington and Riyadh have deepened significantly in recent months.

During Trump’s visit to the Kingdom in May, the two countries signed $142 billion in Memoranda of Intent, which included major Saudi investments in the US defense industrial base.

Sources familiar with the discussions previously told The Wall Street Journal that a deal allowing American companies to export advanced semiconductor chips to Saudi Arabia was nearing completion.

Last week, Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and US-based Qualcomm Technologies announced a landmark agreement aimed at positioning the Kingdom as a global hub for artificial intelligence (AI). The announcement, made on the sidelines of the ninth Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, builds on a partnership first unveiled during the Saudi–US Investment Forum in May, part of Trump’s visit to the Kingdom.

According to a joint statement released, the new collaboration will deliver global AI inferencing services through what the companies described as the world’s first fully optimized edge-to-cloud hybrid AI platform.