Despite its small population, the UAE is positioning itself as a serious contender in the global artificial intelligence race through heavy investment in computing infrastructure and talent development. At the centre of this push is Stargate UAE, a one-gigawatt computing cluster being built within a broader five-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus in Abu Dhabi. Emirati firm G42 is constructing the facility, while OpenAI and Oracle will operate it and Nvidia supplies the chips. The project's first 200-megawatt phase is expected to come online in 2026.
Beyond hardware, the UAE has made notable gains in cultivating AI talent. According to Stanford's 2025 AI Index, the concentration of AI talent in the UAE grew 121 per cent between 2019 and 2025, the fastest increase of any country measured. The government has also rolled out a programme to train 80,000 public-sector employees in agentic AI skills, with the Abu Dhabi Executive Council already using an agentic AI platform during a leadership meeting in October 2026.
Spring Fu, Managing Director of The Academy at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, compared the UAE's trajectory with Singapore, which holds the world's second-highest AI talent concentration at 1.82 per cent of LinkedIn members and already operates over 1.4 gigawatts of data-centre capacity, consuming roughly 7 per cent of the country's electricity. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, visited Singapore in September 2026 to exchange notes on AI policy.
The push comes against a backdrop of staggering global spending: US private AI investment reached $286 billion in 2025, roughly 23 times China's $12.4 billion outlay. By pairing gigawatt-scale infrastructure with an aggressive talent strategy, the UAE is betting that skilled people will matter just as much as raw computing scale in the AI race.