In a significant development for global AI infrastructure, U.S. technology leaders are joining forces with the United Arab Emirates to build one of the world's largest artificial intelligence data centers outside the United States.
The 'UAE Stargate' project, unveiled during President Donald Trump's first foreign state visit of his second term, will be constructed in Abu Dhabi by G42, an Emirati AI company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security advisor and brother of the country's president.
Nvidia, the AI chip market leader, will provide its advanced Blackwell GB300 systems for the facility. These cutting-edge chips, which feature 72 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPUs in a fully liquid-cooled, rack-scale design, deliver 50 times higher output for reasoning model inference compared to previous generation platforms.
The first phase of the UAE Stargate includes a 1-gigawatt compute cluster, but the completed campus will eventually span an impressive 10 square miles with a total capacity of 5 gigawatts – enough power to support millions of AI chips. For context, this makes the facility larger than the entire state of Monaco and represents a significant leap beyond any existing AI infrastructure project.
The UAE Stargate will collaborate with its U.S. counterpart, which was announced by President Trump shortly after his January inauguration. OpenAI, which is also involved in the UAE project, previously announced it was considering building U.S. Stargate data center campuses in 16 states, with construction already underway in Abilene, Texas.
This partnership underscores the intensifying global competition for AI dominance, with the UAE positioning itself as a key hub for advanced computing infrastructure. According to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, "American companies will operate the data centers and offer American-managed cloud services throughout the region," providing a platform from which U.S. hyperscalers can offer services to nearly half the global population.