UAE leads in AI infrastructure, eyes $100 billion investment wave

ABU DHABI –

The United Arab Emirates has cemented its status as a global hub for digital infrastructure in 2025, achieving a world-leading 97 percent utilisation rate of artificial intelligence (AI) tools across government entities and growing its workforce of programmers to over 450,000.

The year saw high-profile international collaborations, most notably the creation of a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi. Powered by a combination of nuclear, solar and gas energy, the campus will host the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States, serving billions of users worldwide.

Complementing this, the UAE launched the “Stargate UAE” project, a 1-gigawatt initiative involving tech giants including G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank and Nvidia. The first phase, powered by advanced NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, is scheduled for 2026.

Strategic cooperation extended to Europe via a UAE–France AI framework, which includes a dedicated 1-gigawatt data centre and joint projects in renewable energy, semiconductors and shared research platforms.

On the investment front, UAE-based MGX has partnered with BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, Nvidia and xAI to form an “AI Infrastructure Partnership” targeting next-generation data centres and energy solutions, with potential funding reaching $100 billion.

The UAE has also leveraged AI for global development, pledging $1 billion to the “AI for Development” initiative at the G20 summit to support African projects, and collaborating with the Gates Foundation on a $200 million AI ecosystem for agricultural development worldwide.

Domestically, AI-related investments exceeded AED543 billion between 2024 and 2025, with multinational firms such as Microsoft and KKR announcing major projects in the UAE. Technological milestones included the launch of Jais 2, a 70-billion-parameter language model trained on the largest Arabic-first dataset ever compiled, 600 billion tokens and K2 Think, a leading open-source system for advanced AI reasoning.

To align technology with national culture, the UAE introduced the “AI in the Ring” index, the world’s first test measuring how closely AI models reflect the country’s values. A national survey found 44 percent of entities now use high-performance computing across 91 specialised applications in healthcare, finance and security.

In the public sector, the UAE rolled out the world’s first AI-driven legislative system for analysing laws and policy impacts, alongside an AI HR assistant serving over 50,000 employees and automating 108 government services. In education, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University reported a 95 percent reduction in faculty workload through AI deployment, with significant improvements in student outcomes.

The UAE Cabinet also inaugurated a Cybersecurity Excellence Centre in partnership with Google Cloud, expected to create more than 20,000 jobs and bolster the national cybersecurity ecosystem.