UAE Reconsiders Massive AI Data Center Amid Regional Tensions

The United Arab Emirates is quietly revising plans for what was intended to be one of the largest artificial intelligence data centers outside the United States, a 5-gigawatt facility. Initially conceived as a single 26-square-kilometer campus in Abu Dhabi, the UAE has decided against concentrating such a strategic asset in one location, a decision influenced by recent regional conflicts, including Iran's missile and drone strikes.

Instead, the UAE is now considering a distributed network of data centers across the country, with some facilities potentially built underground for protection against missile attacks. The original project, known as the UAE-US AI Campus, was announced last year during a visit by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and is a partnership with American tech firms.

In exchange for access to advanced U.S. AI technologies, including Nvidia chips, the UAE committed to severing AI ties with China and investing in the Stargate initiative's data centers. Stargate is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank focused on building AI infrastructure in the United States.

The first phase of the Stargate UAE project, a 1-gigawatt computing cluster costing $30 billion, began construction last year, with the initial 200 megawatts expected to be operational this year. Reuters sources indicate the plan revision accelerated after Iran began launching attacks in the Persian Gulf region in response to U.S. and Israeli actions against Iran. These attacks previously damaged two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain in March.