No country on Earth has adopted artificial intelligence faster than the United Arab Emirates – and the Middle Eastern cultural crossroad’s ambitions to become an AI bridge to the Global South just got another major leg up with the delivery of the latest, cutting-edge US-designed chips.
But those ambitions are taking shape in a hostile environment. Amid the US-Israel war on Iran, Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has repeatedly taken aim at major Emirati data centres, developed in partnership with American technology giants, forcing government planners to pivot and adapt.
“We have learned how to build in a dangerous neighbourhood,” Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the US, told a technology expo in Washington on May 8. “We will harden what needs hardening and close the gaps that were exposed.”
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The UAE’s AI strategy is structured around, on the one hand, deep, capital-intensive investments in frontier US technology firms and, on the other, the development and export of large language models to markets that are underserved by Western platforms such as ChatGPT.
The arrival of the first batch of next-generation Nvidia Blackwell Ultra data centre GPUs earlier this month – following Washington’s authorisation of the advanced graphics processing units’ export last November – brought that second pillar of its strategy one step closer to reality.
Vincent Charles, an AI specialist and professor of management science at Queen’s University Belfast, told This Week in Asia that there was already strong evidence to suggest the Emirati government was executing on its plan to become a leading AI deployment market and infrastructure provider for the Global South.