UAE leads AI infrastructure, eyes $100 billion investment wave
Thursday 25/12/2025 - ABU DHABI
The UAE has moved into 2025 as a global hub for digital infrastructure. Government AI tool adoption hit 97 percent, and the tech workforce passed 450,000 programmers. For builders, this means more compute, faster timelines, and a talent pool that can execute.
Gigawatt-scale compute is now real
A 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi is underway, powered by nuclear, solar and gas. It will host the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States, with capacity to serve billions of users. Expect long-term access to training-grade GPUs and high-throughput networking.
"Stargate UAE," a 1-gigawatt project with G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank and Nvidia, starts its first phase in 2026 using NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems. For planning and hardware roadmaps, see Nvidia's Blackwell overview here.
UAE-France cooperation adds a dedicated 1-gigawatt data centre in Europe plus joint projects in renewables, semiconductors, and shared research platforms. That creates clear options for latency, data locality, and compliance-sensitive workloads.
$100B lining up for data centres and energy
UAE-based MGX and partners BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, Nvidia and xAI formed an AI Infrastructure Partnership targeting next-generation data centres and energy solutions. Funding could reach $100 billion. Translation: multi-year runway for capacity, interconnect upgrades, and cooling innovation.
Why this matters for engineers, architects, and CTOs
- GPU access: GB300-class capacity in 2026 points to better availability and shorter queues. Start vendor assessments now to secure reservation deals and align software stacks with new memory and interconnect profiles.
- Energy-aware scheduling: With nuclear, solar and gas in the mix, plan carbon-aware job placement and off-peak training windows. Bake energy signals into your orchestration layer.
- Data residency by design: Abu Dhabi and France footprints enable regional split-architecture. Map PII flows, define inference/training zones, and document legal bases for cross-border transfer.
- HPC + MLOps: Standardize on distributed training libraries and cluster schedulers (e.g., Kubernetes with batch queues or Slurm). Target 400G+ fabrics, NUMA-aware placement, and liquid cooling readiness.
- Networking choices: Design for packet pacing, RDMA paths, and topology-aware sharding. Budget for optics, fabric redundancy, and jitter-sensitive microbursts.
- Security: A new Cybersecurity Excellence Centre with Google Cloud is expected to add 20,000 jobs and strengthen national capability. Align with zero-trust, signed artifacts, and continuous threat intel across your ML supply chain.
- Talent strategy: A base of 450,000 programmers supports local hiring, colocated pods, and hybrid teams. Set up guilds for distributed training, systems performance, and AI reliability.
- FinOps and procurement: Compare managed AI clouds vs. colo in gigawatt campuses. Negotiate energy clauses, reserved capacity, and liquid-cooling SLAs; build TCO models over 3-5 years.
Public sector is shipping production AI
The UAE deployed an AI-driven legislative analysis system to model policy impacts. An AI HR assistant serves 50,000 employees and 108 government services are now automated. This is a signal: production AI workflows, not pilots.
A national survey reports 44 percent of entities using high-performance computing across 91 applications in healthcare, finance, and security. Expect cross-agency standards and reusable components to mature fast.
Models and research momentum
Jais 2 launched with 70 billion parameters trained on 600 billion tokens, the largest Arabic-first dataset to date. K2 Think, an open-source system for advanced reasoning, adds options for controllable inference and tool use.
For teams localizing LLMs for Arabic and multilingual use, this stack reduces data collection overhead and improves eval coverage across dialects and domains.
Governance and alignment you can measure
The UAE introduced "AI in the Ring," the first test built to check how closely models reflect national values. Use it alongside your internal benchmarks to select models, set thresholds, and document policy compliance.
Global development commitments
The UAE pledged $1 billion to "AI for Development" at the G20 to support African projects, plus a $200 million collaboration with the Gates Foundation for agricultural AI ecosystems. For context on agricultural programs, see the foundation's work here.
What to do in Q1-Q2
- Create a capacity plan for training and inference across Abu Dhabi and France regions, including data residency, latency SLOs, and failover patterns.
- Run cost/perf benchmarks on GB300-class targets vs. current stacks; document kernel and compiler flags needed to hit utilization goals.
- Draft procurement specs: 400G+ fabric, liquid cooling readiness, rack power density, and telemetry APIs. Include energy pricing indexes and carbon reporting.
- Build a carbon-aware scheduler plugin and tie it to CI/CD so energy-optimized jobs are default, not optional.
- Stand up a model governance board using "AI in the Ring" plus internal safety tests; require evals before promotion to production.
- Upskill teams on distributed training, retrieval, evaluation, and AI security. Curated options here: AI courses by skill.
- Integrate SBOMs, signed weights, and runtime attestation into your ML build pipeline; rehearse incident response specific to model and data leaks.
Outlook for 2026
Stargate UAE's first phase goes live in 2026, adding GB300-class capacity at scale. Combined with the UAE-France data centre and the AI Infrastructure Partnership, the compute curve is steepening. Teams that secure capacity, lock in governance, and tune for energy and interconnect will move fastest when the new clusters light up.
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