UAE ditches oil for AI to build Global South tech ‘bridge’

No country on Earth has adopted artificial intelligence faster than the United Arab Emirates – and the Middle Eastern cultural crossroad’s ambitions to become an AI bridge to the Global South just got another major leg up with the delivery of the latest, cutting-edge US-designed chips. But those ambitions are taking shape in a hostile environment. Amid the US-Israel war on Iran, Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has repeatedly taken aim at major Emirati data centres, developed in partnership with American technology giants, forcing government planners to pivot and adapt. “We have learned how to build in a dangerous neighbourhood,” Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the US, told a technology expo in Washington on May 8. “We will harden what needs hardening and close the gaps that were exposed.” The UAE’s AI strategy is structured around, on the one hand, deep, capital-intensive investments in frontier US technology firms and, on the other, the development and export of large language models to markets that are underserved by Western platforms such as ChatGPT. The arrival of the first batch of next-generation Nvidia Blackwell Ultra data centre GPUs earlier this month – following Washington’s authorisation of the advanced graphics processing units’ export last November – brought that second pillar of its strategy one step closer to reality. Vincent Charles, an AI specialist and professor of management science at Queen’s University Belfast, told This Week in Asia that there was already strong evidence to suggest the Emirati government was executing on its plan to become a leading AI deployment market and infrastructure provider for the Global South. In November, for instance, the UAE launched a US$1 billion initiative to expand AI infrastructure across Africa under the banner of ensuring “no country is left behind in the AI age”, Charles said. A centrepiece of its plans is the UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi – touted as the world’s largest AI data centre hub outside the US – anchored in a bilateral “AI acceleration partnership” signed with Washington in May last year. The first 200-megawatt phase of that hub, with a planned capacity of 5 gigawatts, is on track to come online before the year is out. The US only granted Emirati firms access to its most jealously guarded AI technology after G42, a private company majority-owned by UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, divested its holdings in Chinese technology firms and stripped Huawei equipment from its technology stack. Charles called the US-UAE acceleration partnership signed a year ago “a clear turning point” in the bilateral technology relationship. But he added that “residual mistrust” – over G42’s prior entanglement with Chinese firms and over the broader spectre of sensitive technology being leaked through commercial channels – “has not disappeared”. Because of its ownership structure, Washington views Abu Dhabi-based G42 as both a commercial actor and an instrument of state, according to Charles. “That dual role creates enduring sensitivities around trust, governance and long-term alignment regardless of formal assurances,” he said. At the AI expo on May 8, Ambassador Otaiba dismissed suggestions given voice by US Congress members that Abu Dhabi might be playing both sides in the US-China tech war, stating: “We are not hedging. We are not diversifying away. We made a choice and we are doubling down on it.” ‘Difficult trade-offs’ The UAE has the world’s highest AI adoption rate, according to the latest Microsoft AI Economy Institute’s AI Diffusion Report, with over 70 per cent of its working-age population regularly engaging with such tools – the first country to cross that threshold. A study last year by colocation provider TRG Datacentres found the UAE ranked second only to the United States in raw AI capability, with more than 188,000 AI chips and 6.4GW of total power capacity. “Critically, the UAE is already deploying this capacity southward,” Charles said, pointing not only to the state’s US$1 billion pledge to the African continent as a whole but also to a second commitment, also valued at US$1 billion, from G42 and Microsoft to build out AI infrastructure in Kenya, including a geothermal-powered data centre and development of Swahili/English-language AI models. “Geography, capital, relatively neutral geopolitical positioning and established trade relationships across Africa and South Asia give the UAE structural advantages that few Western nations can easily replicate as a Global South AI bridge,” Charles said. However, all this comes against the backdrop of the Iran conflict. AI infrastructure was “increasingly becoming potential military targets and relatively cheap drones can create serious risks for expensive and strategically important facilities”, said Yasir Atalan, deputy director and data fellow in the Futures Lab at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. In response, the UAE’s major AI players – predominantly state-owned companies or private concerns linked to powerful officials – have been pivoting towards a more distributed AI architecture, seeking to spread vulnerable data centres across multiple sites to ensure that no single strike can cripple operations. But the cost implications are not insignificant. Strengthening facilities, integrating advanced air defence systems, or burying infrastructure underground where feasible, all carry a steep price tag. “They may also delay some projects,” Atalan said. An even more ambitious solution would see the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain – develop a regional AI resilience model, pooling interconnected data centres that could backstop one another during disruptions. But Atalan cautioned that any such arrangement would involve “difficult trade-offs related to cost, sovereignty, security and trust among regional partners” – an allusion to the deepening strains between the UAE and Saudi Arabia that were again thrown into sharp relief when Abu Dhabi withdrew from Opec late last month. Otaiba told the AI expo in Washington earlier this month that the UAE had quit the cartel because its economy was no longer dependent solely on oil. “After nearly 60 years, we walked away – not over a quarrel about quotas, but because that era is over,” he said. “The new club is built on AI, advanced technology and trusted partnerships,” Otaiba added, referring to the UAE’s membership of Pax Silica, the US-led alliance launched in December to coordinate supply chains for AI hardware, semiconductors and critical minerals. Otaiba pledged that the UAE would review its critical infrastructure damaged in the recent conflict, including data centres, energy facilities and logistics hubs, and “come out stronger, with a clearer sense of where we are going”. Last month, Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the UAE’s prime minister and vice-president, set a two-year deadline for 50 per cent of government operations and services to migrate to automated “agentic AI” systems. “AI is no longer a tool,” he declared. “It analyses, decides, executes and improves in real time. It will become our executive partner to enhance services, accelerate decisions and raise efficiency.” Drone threats have done little to slow that timeline, it seems. If anything, they only appear to have hardened the UAE’s resolve.

UAE ditches oil for AI to build Global South tech ‘bridge’

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With its Opec era over, the Gulf state has big post-war ambitions for Africa and beyond, bolstered by elite Nvidia chip deliveries

With its Opec era over, the Gulf state has big post-war ambitions for Africa and beyond, bolstered by elite Nvidia chip deliveries