Abu Dhabi is on course to bring the first phase of its record-breaking AI campus online before the end of 2026, a senior UAE official confirmed during high-level meetings with US government leaders in Washington, DC, earlier this month.
The update came during the visit of Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the UAE Executive Affairs Authority, to Washington DC, where he met with US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, and members of Congress. Officials confirmed that the first phase of the UAE-US AI Campus, with a capacity of 500 megawatts, is on track to come online before year-end.
What Is Being Built
Planned to reach a total capacity of 5 gigawatts, the UAE-US AI Campus is set to become the largest AI campus outside the United States and a cornerstone of the UAE-US AI Acceleration Partnership launched during US President Donald Trump’s state visit to the UAE in May 2025.
The campus spans 19.2 square kilometres in Masdar City and is anchored by Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI infrastructure cluster being built by Khazna Data Centres, a G42 company, in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank Group.
Stargate UAE will be built by G42 and operated by OpenAI and Oracle. NVIDIA will supply the latest Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, while Cisco will provide zero-trust security and AI-ready connectivity. The facility will be powered by a combination of nuclear, solar, and natural gas to minimise carbon emissions.
Construction at Scale
More than 5,000 workers are on site and over 100,000 cubic metres of concrete have already been poured, with steelwork weighing one and a half times the mass of the Eiffel Tower already in place.
Khazna has adopted a design-to-build approach to ensure a seamless transition from concept to execution, with civil, structural, and architectural construction well advanced and mechanical and electrical systems being finalised.
The UAE has also received its first shipment of Nvidia’s powerful CPUs and GPUs. The authorisation to purchase the equivalent of up to 35,000 NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips marks a significant step up in compute capacity from the couple of thousand chips previously available to G42.
Why This Matters for the Region
The scale of the Abu Dhabi project reflects the UAE’s ambition to become a leading global destination for AI investment and innovation at a time when countries around the world are racing to secure the computing capacity needed to power increasingly sophisticated AI models and digital services.
Stargate UAE will provide cutting-edge compute infrastructure and is designed to enhance AI capabilities to address the growing demand across the combined $8 trillion economies of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
The campus is expected to strengthen the UAE’s position as a regional technology hub, enabling international technology companies, researchers, and developers to access advanced computing resources while supporting the country’s broader economic diversification strategy.
With the first 500MW phase due before year-end and the remaining four gigawatts the subject of ongoing discussions with additional US hyperscalers, Abu Dhabi’s AI infrastructure ambitions are moving from announcement to reality at a pace few anticipated even a year ago.
