The UAE is putting AI at the center of its growth strategy with record investment, acquisitions
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has put artificial intelligence at the heart of its economic and development agenda for 2025, which includes record government acquisitions and major infrastructure projects, international partnerships and increased investment.
Official statistics show that 97 percent of UAE government organizations are now using AI tools, the highest rate of use globally. The country’s digital talent pool also grew rapidly, with the number of programmers exceeding 450,000 during the year.
A major milestone was the launch of the 5-gigawatt UAE–US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi. Designed to serve billions of users, the site is planned to be the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States and will be powered by a mix of nuclear, solar and gas energy sources.
UAE strengthens global AI partnership
This was followed by the announcement of the Stargate UAE project, a 1 gigawatt initiative involving G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank and Nvidia. The project will use advanced NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, with its first phase scheduled to go live in 2026.
The UAE is also expanding its international cooperation in artificial intelligence through a new framework with France. The agreement includes plans for a 1-gigawatt dedicated data center, as well as joint plans for renewable energy, advanced semiconductors and shared research platforms.
On the investment side, UAE-based MGX has joined BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, Nvidia and xAI in the AI Infrastructure Partnership targeting next-generation data centers and power solutions. The partnership could involve investments of up to $100 billion.
AI has also been positioned as a tool for international development. At the G20 summit, the UAE committed $1 billion to the “AI for Development” program that supports projects across Africa, and a $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation focused on building an AI ecosystem to improve agriculture around the world.
Domestically, total investment related to AI between 2024 and 2025 has exceeded AED543 billion, with major global firms including Microsoft and KKR announcing significant commitments to the country, WAM reports.
Technological advances included the launch of Jais 2, a 70 billion parameter language model trained on 600 billion Arabic tokens, the largest Arabic data set of its kind. The UAE also launched K2 Think, an open source system designed for advanced AI thinking.
AI powers UAE public services
In the public sector, the government launched the world’s first AI-powered legal system to analyze laws and policy implications, as well as an AI-powered human resources assistant serving more than 50,000 employees and automating 108 services. A national survey found that 44 percent of businesses now use high-performance computing across 91 specialized applications in areas including healthcare, finance and security.
The year ended with the launch of the Center for Cybersecurity Excellence in partnership with Google Cloud, which is expected to create more than 20,000 jobs and strengthen the national cybersecurity ecosystem.
Together, these developments emphasize that artificial intelligence has become a key pillar of the UAE’s growth strategy, building infrastructure investment, public services and global relations by 2025.
