Inside Stargate UAE: How Abu Dhabi Is Building One of the World's Largest AI Campuses

The UAE is no longer just buying into the AI boom — it's building the physical plumbing for it. In the desert outside Abu Dhabi, a coalition of the biggest names in American and Emirati tech is racing to construct Stargate UAE, a compute cluster designed to be among the largest AI data center projects anywhere outside the United States.

What Was Announced

Stargate UAE was unveiled on May 22, 2025, during a visit by US President Donald Trump to the UAE, in a joint announcement from G42 (the Abu Dhabi-based AI and cloud company), OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group, and Cisco. The project sits inside a larger development the partners are calling the UAE-US AI Campus, which is planned to eventually support up to 5 gigawatts of AI compute capacity.

Stargate UAE itself is the first and most concrete piece of that campus: a 1-gigawatt compute cluster that G42 is building, with OpenAI and Oracle set to operate it once it's running. For context, a gigawatt of dedicated compute capacity puts this in the same league as the largest hyperscale AI data center projects being built in the US — a notable statement for a single site in the Gulf.

The first phase — a 200-megawatt slice of that eventual 1-gigawatt cluster — is what's actually under construction right now, with partners targeting it going live sometime in 2026.

Who's Building What

The project reads like a roll call of the AI supply chain:

G42, chaired by UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the project's builder and anchor Emirati partner, drawing on its existing data center and cloud operations across the region.
OpenAI and Oracle are slated to jointly operate the finished cluster, extending the "Stargate" branding OpenAI has already used for its US-based data center buildout with Oracle and SoftBank.
NVIDIA is supplying the chips — specifically its Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, the chipmaker's current top-tier platform for large-scale AI training and inference.
Cisco is providing the networking backbone, including what it describes as "zero-trust" security architecture for the campus.
SoftBank Group rounds out the consortium as a financial and strategic partner, mirroring its role in OpenAI's domestic Stargate ventures.

G42 CEO Peng Xiao has said the construction effort currently involves more than 7,000 workers and roughly 100 cranes on site — numbers that underline just how far this has moved beyond a press-release announcement into an active, physical build.

Why the UAE, and Why Now

A few things make Abu Dhabi a logical place for a project of this scale. Power is one: the campus is being designed to draw on a mix of nuclear, solar, and natural gas generation, letting the partners pursue the kind of multi-gigawatt scale that's becoming hard to permit and power quickly in parts of the US and Europe. Capital is another — the UAE, through G42 and sovereign-linked investment vehicles, has been willing to commit heavily to AI infrastructure as a national strategic priority, not just a commercial bet.

There's also a geopolitical dimension worth noting plainly: the deal required sign-off at the US government level because it involves exporting advanced NVIDIA AI chips to a Gulf state, something that had been a sensitive question in Washington given concerns about chip diversion to China. The Trump administration's approval of the arrangement in mid-2025 was itself a significant policy shift, and it's part of why the announcement was timed to a presidential visit rather than a routine corporate press cycle.

For OpenAI, a Gulf-based compute cluster also diversifies where its "Stargate" infrastructure physically sits, reducing reliance on any single country's power grid, land, and regulatory environment as it tries to scale compute for both training frontier models and running inference for a growing user base.

What It Means for the Region

G42's own ambitions give a sense of what this capacity is actually meant to do. The company has talked about targets in the range of a billion AI "agents" operating by 2026 — software systems carrying out tasks autonomously on behalf of businesses and governments — and has framed the Stargate UAE buildout as the infrastructure needed to make that kind of scale possible. Even running for a fraction of the day, agent workloads at that volume consume enormous amounts of compute, which is the underlying logic for why gigawatt-scale capacity is the target rather than a more modest buildout.

For the UAE more broadly, Stargate is one piece of a wider push — alongside existing G42 data centers, national AI strategies, and university and research investment — to position the country as a genuine AI infrastructure hub rather than just a market for AI products built elsewhere. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have spent the past decade building out logistics, finance, and aviation infrastructure to punch above their population size; AI compute is shaping up to be the next category where the emirates are trying to do the same thing.

What to Watch

The real test comes in 2026, when the first 200-megawatt phase is due to go live. Delivering gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure on schedule is notoriously difficult — power interconnection, chip supply, and cooling have all slowed comparable projects elsewhere — so the extent to which Stargate UAE hits its stated timeline will say a lot about whether Abu Dhabi can execute at the same speed it has signed deals. If it does, it will be one of the clearest signs yet that the next phase of the AI buildout isn't confined to Silicon Valley or the US Sun Belt, but increasingly global, with the Gulf as one of its most aggressive new players.