Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala has struck a strategic partnership with San Francisco-based Together AI, a move set to deepen the UAE's push into open-source artificial intelligence. Under the agreement, Together AI will open an office in Abu Dhabi to scale up its inference and research operations across the region.
The tie-up builds on an existing relationship: Mubadala backed Together AI's $100 million Series C funding round earlier this summer. The fund itself oversees roughly $385 billion in assets spread across six continents, giving it significant firepower to back emerging AI infrastructure plays.
Together AI founder and chief executive Vipul Ved Prakash said demand for open-source AI models is now outpacing the compute capacity available to serve them, and that establishing a base in Abu Dhabi would let the company address that gap closer to a fast-growing customer base in the Gulf.
The announcement fits into the UAE's National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031, which aims to position the country among the world's leading AI hubs. Abu Dhabi has already attracted major technology players including Microsoft and OpenAI in recent years, and officials see each new arrival as reinforcing the emirate's claim to be a serious alternative to Silicon Valley for AI infrastructure investment.
For UAE-based developers and researchers, a local Together AI office could mean faster, cheaper access to open-source models without routing workloads through US or European data centres. The deal also arrives as Gulf states compete intensely for AI capital, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar pursuing similar data-centre and investment deals. Analysts say partnerships like this help diversify the UAE economy away from oil while cementing Abu Dhabi and Dubai as attractive bases for AI-focused startups and research teams.