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UAE and US to build largest AI campus outside America

By Valentina Pasquali
Donald Trump was greeted by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at Qasr Al Watan Reuters/Amr Alfiky
Donald Trump was greeted by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at Qasr Al Watan
  • AI facility to be in Abu Dhabi
  • Part of $200bn in deals
  • Trump ends tour of Gulf

The US and UAE will develop a 10 square mile artificial intelligence campus in Abu Dhabi, according to a White House statement on Thursday.

It will be the largest such facility outside of America.

The announcement came as US President Donald Trump met UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the Qasr Al Watan presidential palace. 

It forms part of $200 billion in deals involving the two nations that were agreed during the third and last leg of Trump’s tour of the Gulf, according to a White House fact sheet. 

The US president’s UAE stop also helped advance a $1.4 trillion investment framework previously agreed during a high level Emirati visit to Washington in March, the White House said. 

The Abu Dhabi campus will provide 5GW of capacity for local data centres to enable American hyperscalers – large cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure – to offer ultra-fast services “to nearly half of the global population living within 3,200km (2,000 miles) of the UAE”.

Emirati AI developer G42 will lead construction of the plant, which will start with a 1GW capacity, in partnership with multiple US firms, according to a press release from the US Department of Commerce. Nuclear, solar and gas will combine to power the new operation.

The project exemplifies the growing cooperation between the US and UAE in the AI domain, and the Emirates’ push to position itself “as a hub for cutting edge research and sustainable development,” said Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and chairman of the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council.

US commerce secretary Howard W. Lutnick said the agreement to build the new cluster “launches an historic Middle Eastern partnership on AI”. 

“In the UAE, American companies will operate the data centres and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region,” Lutnick said. 

Underpinning the effort is a “US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership,” a new government-to-government framework that, according to Lutnick, provides the necessary security guarantees “to prevent diversion of US technology”. 

Advanced US technology also dominated talks and deals during President Trump’s first stop of his Gulf trip in Saudi Arabia.

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