Stargate UAE
Last reviewed
Sources
9 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v3 · 1,815 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Sources
9 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v3 · 1,815 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Stargate UAE is a large artificial intelligence data center cluster being built in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and is the first site of the Stargate Project located outside the United States. Announced on 22 May 2025 by a group of American and Emirati companies, it is a 1 gigawatt (GW) compute cluster sitting inside a larger 5 GW campus, the UAE-US AI Campus, with a first 200 megawatt (MW) phase targeted to come online in 2026. The partners are the Abu Dhabi AI firm G42 (the developer), OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank Group.[1][2][3]
OpenAI frames the project as the opening move in its "OpenAI for Countries" program, an effort to help allied governments build sovereign AI infrastructure using American technology. The announcement coincided with US President Donald Trump's May 2025 trip to the Gulf, during which Washington and Abu Dhabi reached a broader understanding on exporting advanced US chips to the UAE. Because the most capable AI accelerators are subject to US export controls, Stargate UAE has become a test case for how far the United States is willing to let allied states build frontier-scale compute on American silicon.[1][4]
Stargate UAE is an AI-dedicated data center complex rather than a general cloud region. The headline figure is a 1 GW compute cluster, which the partners describe as being built by G42 and operated jointly by OpenAI and Oracle.[1][2] That cluster is one component of a much larger development, the UAE-US AI Campus, which is planned to reach 5 GW of total capacity over time. UAE officials have said the full campus will span about 10 square miles (roughly 19 square kilometers), making it larger than the country of Monaco by area.[3][5]
The site is being developed by Khazna Data Centres, a G42 company, on a design-to-build basis. NVIDIA is supplying its Grace Blackwell GB300 systems for the compute, the same generation as the GB300 NVL72 rack-scale platform. Cisco is providing networking and what it calls zero-trust security for the campus, and SoftBank is one of the founding partners. The partners have said the cluster's location gives it the potential to serve users within a 2,000-mile radius, a range that reaches up to half the world's population across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.[1][2]
At the launch, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman described the project this way: "By establishing the world's first Stargate outside of the U.S. in the UAE, we're transforming a bold vision into reality. This is the first major milestone in our OpenAI for Countries initiative, our effort to work with allies and partners to build AI infrastructure around the world."[2]
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Location | Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates |
| Announced | 22 May 2025 (during President Trump's Gulf trip) |
| Lead developer | G42 / Khazna Data Centres |
| Operators | OpenAI and Oracle |
| Other partners | NVIDIA, SoftBank Group, Cisco |
| Cluster capacity | 1 GW (Stargate UAE) |
| Campus capacity | 5 GW (UAE-US AI Campus), about 10 sq miles |
| First phase | 200 MW, targeted live in 2026 (reported Q3 2026) |
| Reported cost | About $10 billion (initial); campus "more than $30 billion" (Jan 2026) |
| Hardware | NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems |
| Program | OpenAI for Countries (first international Stargate) |
The broader Stargate Project was unveiled in January 2025 as a US-focused joint venture led by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, with a stated ambition to invest up to $500 billion in American AI data centers over several years. Its flagship US site is the Abilene data center in Texas. Stargate UAE extends that brand abroad, which is why OpenAI bills it as "the first Stargate outside of the US."[1][2]
The two efforts are related but distinct. The original Stargate is a domestic US buildout backed by a specific group of investors, while Stargate UAE is a separately financed Emirati project that uses the same partners and the same naming. The connective tissue is OpenAI for Countries, which OpenAI announced in May 2025 as a way to replicate the Stargate model in partnership with foreign governments, with the UAE as the launch customer.[1]
The lineup mixes one Emirati anchor with several American technology firms. G42, an Abu Dhabi AI and cloud group, is the local developer and majority backer; its data center subsidiary Khazna is actually constructing the facility. OpenAI and Oracle are named as the operators of the 1 GW cluster, meaning OpenAI's models and Oracle's cloud infrastructure are expected to run on the hardware. NVIDIA supplies the chips. Cisco handles networking and security. SoftBank, already a lead investor in the US Stargate, rounds out the group.[1][2][5]
G42 sits at the center of the arrangement for a reason. The company has spent the past two years deepening ties with US technology firms, including a major investment from Microsoft in 2024, partly as a condition of moving away from Chinese suppliers. That repositioning is what made it acceptable, from Washington's perspective, for G42 to be the recipient of large volumes of restricted American chips. Hassan Al Naqbi, chief executive of Khazna, said in an October 2025 update that "construction is now well under way and progressing steadily towards the planned 2026 delivery," with civil and structural work advanced and modular components in production.[5][6]
The figures around Stargate UAE have grown since the first announcement. In May 2025 the project was generally described as a roughly $10 billion, 1 GW cluster within a 5 GW campus.[1][4] By January 2026, Omar Al Olama, the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, told reporters that the full campus would cost "more than $30 billion to build," up from earlier internal estimates closer to $20 billion, and confirmed the 5 GW target.[3]
The physical scale of just the first phase is large. By December 2025, The National reported that more than 5,000 workers were on site building the initial 200 MW, that more than 100,000 cubic metres of concrete had been poured, and that "the current steelworks weigh 1.5 times as much as the Eiffel Tower."[9] For comparison, a 1 GW data center campus is on the order of a thousand times the power draw of a conventional enterprise facility, which is why backers describe the full 5 GW campus as one of the largest AI sites in the world.[3][5]
The buildout is phased. Khazna is constructing the first 200 MW of the 1 GW cluster on what it calls an accelerated timeline, with completion reported to be targeted for the third quarter of 2026.[5][7][9] Khazna has described a full build-out of the 1 GW cluster over roughly three years, with the wider 5 GW campus extending well beyond that.[5] An October 2025 construction update from G42 reported that long-lead equipment had been procured and that the first mechanical systems had arrived on site.[6] Some later trade and regional press accounts reported a formal groundbreaking ceremony in early 2026, though the official partner updates from 2025 already described active construction, so the timeline of formal milestones versus actual building work is somewhat blurred.[6][7]
Stargate UAE is as much a diplomatic project as an engineering one. The constraint that shapes everything is US export policy. Since 2022, Washington has restricted sales of the most advanced AI accelerators, and the Gulf states were initially caught in those rules. The May 2025 announcement was paired with a preliminary US-UAE understanding, reported at the time, that would let the UAE import on the order of 500,000 of NVIDIA's most advanced chips per year, a volume far beyond anything previously permitted for the region.[4]
That framework did not become reality all at once. On 20 November 2025, the US Department of Commerce announced it had authorized exports to G42 and to the Saudi firm Humain, allowing each to acquire the equivalent of up to 35,000 of NVIDIA's Blackwell GB300 chips, subject to what Commerce called "rigorous security and reporting requirements."[8] The conditions reflect the core tension: the United States wants allied countries building on American AI stacks rather than Chinese ones, but it also wants assurances that the chips and the models trained on them cannot be diverted or accessed by adversaries. For Abu Dhabi, hosting OpenAI's compute is a way to position the UAE as a regional AI hub; for Washington, approving it is a way to keep the Gulf inside the American technology orbit.
There is something genuinely novel here, and also something worth watching. A frontier-scale cluster running a US company's most capable models, on US-designed chips, on Emirati soil, under US-imposed security terms, is a new kind of arrangement. Whether the security guarantees hold, and whether the 5 GW vision is actually built out rather than scaled back, will say a lot about how the export-controlled AI era plays out.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | Stargate Project announced in the US (OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle) |
| May 2025 | Stargate UAE and the 5 GW UAE-US AI Campus announced during Trump's Gulf trip; OpenAI for Countries launched |
| Oct 2025 | G42/Khazna report construction "well under way"; long-lead equipment procured |
| Nov 2025 | US Commerce authorizes NVIDIA chip exports to G42 (up to ~35,000 GB300-equivalent) |
| Dec 2025 | The National reports 5,000+ workers, 100,000+ cubic metres of concrete, steelworks 1.5x the Eiffel Tower; Q3 2026 reaffirmed |
| Jan 2026 | UAE AI minister says full campus will cost "more than $30 billion" |
| 2026 (reported Q3) | First 200 MW phase targeted to come online |