After the Iran war prompted a rethink of how and where critical infrastructure should be built, the United Arab Emirates is quietly revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project, one of the biggest outside the U.S. Originally envisaged as a 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi, the project will now likely comprise a network of data centers spread across the UAE. Authorities are also considering ways to better protect the facilities from drone and missile attacks, including with air defenses.
The modifications to the project’s blueprint have not previously been reported.
Plans for the UAE-US AI Campus, which is being built in partnership with American tech companies, were announced during President Donald Trump's visit last year to the wealthy Gulf state. The project is central to the UAE's ambitions to become a global AI powerhouse as it shifts its economy away from oil.
The project is led by G42, an AI firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE national security adviser and brother of its president.
In return for access to Nvidia’s AI chips and other advanced U.S. technology, the UAE agreed to cut AI ties with China and invest in the Stargate initiative’s American data centers.
Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build AI infrastructure.
Construction on the first phase of the project, a $30-billion, 1-gigawatt compute cluster known as Stargate UAE, began last year with the first 200 megawatts of capacity due to come online this year. When completed, it will have enough capacity to connect every UAE government agency and commercial institution to the world's most advanced AI models, according to Larry Ellison, chairman and chief technology officer at Oracle, which is partnering with G42 on the project.
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