US President Donald Trump and UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan have announced a massive AI data center campus.
The 10-square-mile UAE-US AI Campus will be located in Abu Dhabi, built by Emirati AI company G42, and is expected to grow to some 5GW.
The chair and controlling shareholder of G42, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the brother of the UAE president. Tahnoun is also the nation’s national security adviser and chair of Stargate-backer MGX.
G42 also owns regional data center operator Khazna.
Timelines for the project were not shared, but the US government said that the first phase will span 1GW. The site is expected to use nuclear, solar, and gas power.
The campus is expected to be used as a “regional platform from which US hyperscalers will be able to offer latency-friendly services to nearly half of the global population,” the US government said.
Hyperscalers would likely choose much closer locations for latency-constrained applications, but could use the site for regional workloads or AI training.
Microsoft partnered with G42 for a regional sovereign cloud back in 2023, and signed a similar deal with its parent company, Core42, this March. The hyperscaler has also invested $1.5bn in G42, and plans to develop data centers around the world in partnership.
Both Microsoft and MGX are investors in a BlackRock AI infrastructure fund.
G42 is separately spending around $900 million on Cerebras Systems mega chips to deploy across nine supercomputers in the US.
The company has, however, been accused of acting as a funnel for US technology to China – something the company has denied. In 2024, the Biden Administration said that Microsoft’s investment in the company was “generally a positive development” because it forced the company to sever ties to China’s Huawei.
This week, as part of a broader tour of the Middle East that saw a slew of high-profile Saudi data center announcements, Trump dropped Biden-era plans to limit chip exports.
Those limits were originally pitched as stopping hardware from eventually making its way to China, but the Trump administration has countered that the hardware will instead go to US-backed interests overseas.
“Today’s agreement launches a historic Middle Eastern partnership on AI between our two nations,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said of the UAE deal.
“It promotes major investment in advanced semiconductors and data centers across the US and the UAE. In the UAE, American companies will operate the data centers and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region. The agreement also contains strong security guarantees to prevent diversion of US technology.”
G42’s Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan added: “Today’s agreement is a testament to the ongoing collaboration between our countries in artificial intelligence.
“It is an expression of the UAE’s commitment to pioneering innovation and fostering global collaboration in artificial intelligence, strengthening the UAE’s position as a hub for cutting-edge research and sustainable development, delivering transformative benefits for humanity.”
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