Inside Stargate UAE: How Abu Dhabi Is Building an AI Campus the Size of a City

Drive out past Abu Dhabi's city limits today and you'll find one of the largest construction sites on the planet: more than 100 cranes and 7,000 workers racing to finish the first phase of Stargate UAE, a compute cluster that will eventually anchor a 5-gigawatt "AI campus" spread across roughly 10 square miles of desert. G42 CEO Peng Xiao gave that worker-and-crane count himself at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, and it's a useful way to grasp just how physical the AI race has become. This isn't an app or a model release — it's steel, concrete, chips, and power plants.

What Stargate UAE actually is

Stargate UAE was announced on May 22, 2025, during US President Donald Trump's state visit to the UAE, when G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group and Cisco jointly unveiled the project. It sits inside a larger site called the UAE–US AI Campus, which is designed to eventually host 5 gigawatts of data-centre capacity — making it, by most accounts, the largest AI infrastructure project outside the United States.

Within that campus, Stargate UAE itself is a 1-gigawatt compute cluster being built by G42's data-centre arm, Khazna, and operated jointly by OpenAI and Oracle. NVIDIA is supplying its latest Grace Blackwell GB300 systems — the company's most advanced AI server platform — with reports putting the initial order at roughly 100,000 of these chips. Cisco is providing networking and "zero-trust" security architecture, and SoftBank is one of the project's financial backers.

The launch ceremony was attended by UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the country's National Security Adviser and Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi, who also chairs G42. Peng Xiao, G42's Group CEO, described the project as "a bridge rooted in trust and ambition" meant to extend the benefits of AI "to economies, societies and people around the world."

The timeline, in real terms

Big infrastructure announcements often come with vague, distant promises. Stargate UAE has been unusually specific, and so far it has mostly stuck to its own schedule. The first 200 megawatts of capacity are expected to come online in 2026, with civil, structural and architectural work already underway alongside the installation of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. Modular equipment production and long-lead-time hardware procurement were reported as already in motion by late 2025. The remaining buildout toward the full 1-gigawatt Stargate cluster — and the broader 5-gigawatt campus around it — does not yet have a confirmed completion date.

For a facility of this scale, power is as much the story as the chips. The campus is being designed to draw on a mix of nuclear, solar and natural gas generation, a combination chosen to keep the carbon footprint down while still guaranteeing the enormous, constant electricity load that a gigawatt-scale AI cluster demands. The UAE already operates the Arab world's first nuclear power plant at Barakah, which makes nuclear-fed AI infrastructure a more realistic near-term option here than in most countries attempting something similar.

Why the chips became the hard part

The most interesting part of this story isn't the concrete — it's the paperwork. Routing tens of thousands of NVIDIA's most advanced AI chips to a facility outside the United States required sign-off from Washington, and that sign-off was not automatic. US officials raised concerns that G42, given its past commercial ties to Chinese technology firms, could become an indirect route for sensitive American chip technology to reach China.

G42 responded by divesting its Chinese holdings and removing Chinese-made hardware from its infrastructure — a process that reportedly began under pressure from the Biden administration and continued into the current deal. As part of the arrangement, G42 also agreed to build a matching data centre on US soil for every one it operates in the UAE, and Microsoft took a $1.5 billion stake in the company. The result was eventual US authorisation for G42 to import the equivalent of up to 35,000 NVIDIA Blackwell-class chips, under what officials described as a strict compliance and reporting framework intended to prevent diversion of the technology.

It's a useful reminder that the UAE's AI ambitions don't exist in a vacuum. Every gigawatt of compute here is tied to a geopolitical negotiation over who gets to build with the world's most advanced silicon, and on what terms.

Why this matters beyond Abu Dhabi

G42 has framed Stargate UAE as the centrepiece of something it calls the "Intelligence Grid" — a network of AI hubs it wants to see connecting the UAE with partners across Asia, Europe and Africa, with Abu Dhabi positioned as a neutral, well-capitalised node in between. Xiao has also talked about more immediate ambitions tied to the infrastructure, including a stated goal of helping deploy roughly a billion AI agents by 2026 — an aggressive target that will be worth watching against what actually ships.

For the UAE specifically, the campus is a continuation of a strategy that's been building for years: position the country not just as an adopter of AI, but as a place where the physical infrastructure of the AI era actually gets built. That's a different bet than the one most Gulf states have made with oil wealth before — it's a bet that compute, not just capital, is the asset worth owning.

Whether Stargate UAE hits its 2026 milestone on schedule, and how quickly the rest of the 5-gigawatt campus follows, will say a lot about whether "AI infrastructure built outside the US" becomes a durable category — or whether this remains the exception that proves how hard it is to do.

Sources: Gulf News, Khaleej Times, IntelligentCIO Middle East, WAM, and reporting on US chip-export security conditions via Mobile World Live and StratNews Global.