A massive artificial intelligence campus is rising out of the Abu Dhabi desert, marking the United Arab Emirates’ most ambitious effort yet to pivot from an oil-driven economy to one powered by advanced technology. Spread across an area roughly a quarter the size of Paris, the site will house data centres running on five gigawatts of electricity — making it the largest facility of its kind outside the United States.
Johan Nilerud, chief strategy officer of Khazna Data Centres — a subsidiary of Emirati AI giant G42 — said the campus will support storage and computing capacity across a 3,200-kilometre radius, serving as many as four billion people. He noted that the UAE, long fuelled by oil wealth, now wants to secure a leading role in the global AI landscape as it prepares for a future where oil demand eventually declines.
Phase one of the project, the one-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster built by G42, will be operated by OpenAI and joined by major US tech partners including Oracle, Cisco and Nvidia. The UAE’s AI ecosystem has also attracted massive investment from Microsoft, which committed over $15.2 billion in additional funding by 2029 after investing $1.5 billion in G42 last year.
The UAE has aggressively pursued AI development since launching the world’s first Ministry of Artificial Intelligence in 2017 and unveiling a national AI strategy. G42, backed by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, now employs more than 23,000 people. The government says it has invested more than $147 billion in AI since 2024, including a major stake in a one-gigawatt data centre in France.
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Abu Dhabi has also pushed to build domestic expertise. It opened the world’s first AI-focused university, MBZUAI, in 2019 and introduced AI as a core subject in public schools from kindergarten. The country’s research institutions — MBZUAI and the Technology Innovation Institute — have launched generative AI models such as Falcon, including an Arabic version.
Officials say the goal is self-reliance, with heavy investment in research labs and partnerships, such as a joint TII-Nvidia facility aimed at advancing generative AI and robotics. Experts say the UAE’s deep financial resources, abundant energy supply, and business-friendly environment give it an edge as it navigates complex geopolitical competition.
The UAE has also secured approval from Washington to import advanced Nvidia chips, a critical breakthrough after months of lobbying, as it tries to avoid over-dependence on either the US or China.
Despite its rapid progress, analysts caution that success is not guaranteed in an industry evolving at unprecedented speed. They say the global race for AI dominance will produce winners and losers — and even with enormous investment, the outcome remains uncertain.
