Stargate UAE Explained: The 1GW AI Bet on Abu Dhabi

What Is Stargate UAE?

Stargate UAE is a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster announced on May 22, 2025 by G42 alongside OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group and Cisco. It sits inside the 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi, and its first 200-megawatt phase is expected to come online in 2026, according to G42's launch announcement.

Key Takeaways

• Stargate UAE is a 1GW AI compute cluster in Abu Dhabi, announced on May 22, 2025 by G42 with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group and Cisco.
• G42's Khazna Data Centers is building the facility, and OpenAI and Oracle will operate it once live.
• As of December 2025, the first 200MW phase is due for completion in Q3 2026, running NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems.
• The cluster sits inside the 5GW UAE-US AI Campus, billed as the largest AI campus outside the United States.
• At 1GW, this single project is roughly double Khazna's entire 2025 national capacity of 500MW-plus.

Strip away the headline numbers and the concept is simple. The UAE wants frontier-scale AI compute on its own soil, and it has assembled a consortium capable of delivering it. OpenAI called the project its flagship international deployment in its own announcement, and each partner has a defined lane: NVIDIA supplies the Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, Cisco provides security and connectivity, and SoftBank Group rounds out the investor group.

The setting matters as much as the specs. Phase 1 of the wider 5GW UAE-US AI Campus was unveiled on May 15, 2025 at Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi, with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and President Trump both present, per the US Embassy in the UAE. The campus is billed as the largest AI facility of its kind outside the United States, and Stargate UAE is its anchor tenant. For the broader national picture, our complete guide to AI in the UAE maps how this buildout fits the country's wider strategy.

One clarification worth making early: Stargate UAE is not the same thing as the US Stargate Project, even though the name and several partners overlap. The two efforts are related in spirit and in capital, but this article is about the Abu Dhabi cluster specifically.

Who Builds Stargate UAE, and Who Operates It?

Khazna Data Centers, a G42 company, is building Stargate UAE, while OpenAI and Oracle will operate the compute cluster. As of October 16, 2025, the project was in active construction, with long-lead equipment procured and the first mechanical systems on-site, according to a G42 construction update.

That split between builder and operator is the project's defining design choice. G42 and Khazna own the concrete, cooling and power problem. OpenAI and Oracle own the racks once they hum. The arrangement gives the UAE the physical asset while keeping frontier-model operations in the hands of the American firms that run them at home. It echoes the compliance-first structure of the G42-Microsoft partnership, where a US technology giant took an equity stake in exchange for security assurances.

On timing, the picture sharpened through late 2025. The launch materials said the first 200MW phase would be live in 2026. By December 2025, reporting by The National put completion of that phase in the third quarter of 2026. Khazna, meanwhile, has said it targets full build-out of the entire 1GW project within roughly three years of its October 2025 statements, per The National's coverage that month.

Here is the timeline as it stands at the time of writing (June 2026):

How Does the US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership Fit?

Stargate UAE exists inside a diplomatic wrapper: the US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, agreed in May 2025. It is a government-to-government framework for cooperation on AI and critical technologies, built around shared protection and security standards. As part of the same May 2025 moment, the UAE reaffirmed plans to invest $1.4 trillion in the US over ten years.

Why does a data center need a treaty-grade framework? Because the chips inside it are among the most tightly controlled exports on earth. No US export approval, no GB300 racks in Abu Dhabi, no Stargate UAE. The partnership is the mechanism that makes American silicon at gigawatt scale politically possible, and it did not stay on paper. The first interagency working group meeting under the framework was held in April 2026, according to the US State Department.

Capital flows in both directions under this arrangement. Abu Dhabi's MGX was one of the four initial equity funders of the US Stargate Project announced in January 2025, alongside SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle. In other words, Emirati money helps build American AI infrastructure while American operators run Emirati AI infrastructure. We unpack that investment machinery in our piece on MGX and UAE AI investment vehicles.

There is precedent for this security-for-access trade. The April 2024 Microsoft investment in G42 came with a first-of-its-kind Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement between the US and the UAE on AI safety and security. Stargate UAE scales that same logic from a single corporate deal up to national infrastructure.

How Is Stargate UAE Powered?

According to the official launch announcement from G42 in May 2025, Stargate UAE will be powered by a mix of nuclear, solar and natural gas capacity, chosen "to minimize carbon emissions." That is the extent of what the partners have confirmed publicly, and any plant-level detail beyond that mix should be treated with caution.

A gigawatt of IT load is a serious grid commitment, and the three-source mix is a pragmatic answer to it. Nuclear offers steady baseload, solar is abundant and cheap in the Gulf, and gas provides dispatchable capacity when the other two fall short. AI training runs around the clock, so intermittency is not an option for a facility of this class.

Analysts have speculated about which specific plants will feed the campus. The partners themselves have not confirmed plant-level supply arrangements, so we treat those claims as informed guesswork rather than fact. What can be said with confidence is that the energy question was answered in the launch materials on day one, which tells you the partners saw power, not chips or capital, as the first question serious observers would ask.

Why Does 1GW Matter?

One gigawatt is not an incremental upgrade to the UAE's data-center fleet. It is roughly a doubling of it, delivered as a single project. Khazna, the country's dominant operator, grew its entire portfolio from 28MW in 2020 to more than 500MW in 2025, according to The National and G42. Stargate UAE alone matches two of those portfolios.

Consider the compounding at work. It took Khazna five years and about 74% of the national market, per The National's October 2024 reporting, to reach 500MW-plus. The same builder now intends to add double that figure in roughly three years, on one site. Khazna itself has forecast UAE demand of at least 850MW by 2029; a completed Stargate UAE would exceed that projection on its own.

Think of it as the difference between a busy ferry terminal and a deep-water port. The UAE's existing data centers handle the everyday traffic of cloud and enterprise workloads well. A gigawatt-class cluster is built so the largest cargo in the AI economy, frontier model training and inference at scale, can dock locally instead of routing through the US.

The economic stakes explain the ambition. PwC Middle East projects AI will contribute 96 billion US dollars to the UAE economy by 2030, equal to 13.6% of GDP, the largest relative impact in the Middle East. Compute is the raw input for that number. Without domestic capacity, a growing share of it would be imported.

What Could Slow Stargate UAE Down?

Two honest risks stand out: export-control dependency and timeline slippage. Every NVIDIA system destined for Abu Dhabi requires US government approval, and the first phase has already moved from a general "live in 2026" framing at launch to a Q3 2026 completion date in December 2025 reporting. Neither risk is fatal, but neither is trivial.

Start with the chips. The entire project rests on Washington's continued willingness to license advanced accelerators to the UAE. There is encouraging precedent: Microsoft disclosed in November 2025 that it holds US export licenses for the equivalent of roughly 81,900 NVIDIA A100 GPUs for the UAE, including 60,400 approved as GB300s in September 2025, per Microsoft. Licenses granted under one administration, though, can be slowed or reshaped by the next. That is a structural dependency no amount of local construction removes.

Then there is the schedule itself. In our experience watching infrastructure programs of this size, "roughly three years" for a full gigawatt is aggressive by any global standard. The October 2025 construction update emphasized long-lead equipment precisely because items like generators, chillers and switchgear are the classic bottleneck in a market where every hyperscaler is ordering the same kit. A slip from Q3 2026 would not be surprising; a multi-year slip on the full build-out would change the strategic math.

Grid delivery is the quieter third risk. The nuclear-solar-gas mix is confirmed as an intention, but sequencing new generation and transmission against data-hall completion is a coordination problem measured in years, not quarters.

What Stargate UAE Means for Business

For companies operating in the Gulf, Stargate UAE translates into two practical shifts: more available AI compute in-region, and a stronger data-residency story. Demand is already there. The UAE leads Microsoft's global AI Diffusion leaderboard, with 70.1% of the working-age population using AI in Q1 2026 against a 17.8% global rate, per Microsoft's AI Economy Institute.

Picture a CTO at a Dubai bank comparing cloud regions today. Frontier-scale training capacity mostly means US or European regions, with the latency, contractual and regulatory questions that follow. Once OpenAI and Oracle are operating gigawatt-class capacity in Abu Dhabi, that calculus changes: sensitive workloads can stay in-country while still touching frontier-grade infrastructure.

Data residency is the second-order effect worth watching. Governments and regulated industries across the region increasingly want AI workloads processed under local jurisdiction. A domestic cluster operated by the very firms that build frontier models is an unusual offer; few markets outside the US will be able to match it. That, in turn, strengthens the pull for the broader ecosystem of AI companies operating in the UAE, from sovereign-cloud providers to the startups that build on top of them.

None of this arrives all at once. The first 200MW phase, due Q3 2026 as of December 2025 reporting, is where promises meet racks. Businesses planning 2027 AI budgets should watch that completion date more closely than any announcement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Stargate UAE?

Stargate UAE is a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster announced on May 22, 2025 by G42 together with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group and Cisco. It sits inside the 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi and is designed for frontier-scale AI workloads, starting with a 200-megawatt first phase built on NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems.

Who is building and operating Stargate UAE?

Khazna Data Centers, a G42 company, is building the facility, while OpenAI and Oracle will operate the compute cluster once it is live. As of October 2025, the site was in active construction, with long-lead equipment procured and the first mechanical systems delivered on-site, according to a G42 construction update.

When will Stargate UAE go live?

The first 200-megawatt phase is due for completion in the third quarter of 2026, according to reporting by The National in December 2025. Khazna has said it targets full build-out of the 1-gigawatt project within roughly three years of its October 2025 statements, which points to completion around 2028 if the schedule holds.

How will Stargate UAE be powered?

According to the official launch announcement, Stargate UAE will draw on a mix of nuclear, solar and natural gas capacity to minimize carbon emissions. The partners have not confirmed plant-level supply arrangements, so analyst claims about specific power facilities should be treated as informed speculation rather than confirmed sourcing.

How big is 1GW compared with existing UAE data centers?

Very big. Khazna, the UAE's dominant operator with about 74% market share according to The National (October 2024), grew its entire portfolio from 28MW in 2020 to more than 500MW in 2025. Stargate UAE alone, at 1GW, is roughly double that national fleet and exceeds the 850MW of UAE demand Khazna expects by 2029.

Is Stargate UAE connected to the US Stargate Project?

They share a name, several partners and a strategic logic, but they are separate projects. The US Stargate Project launched in January 2025 with SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi's MGX as its four initial equity funders. Stargate UAE, by contrast, is a G42-built cluster in Abu Dhabi that OpenAI and Oracle will operate.

Where to Go Next

Stargate UAE is one pillar of a much larger construction. For the full national picture, start with our complete guide to AI in the UAE. To understand the corporate scaffolding behind the project, read our analyses of the G42-Microsoft partnership and of MGX, Abu Dhabi's AI investment engine. New briefings on the UAE's AI buildout land regularly; subscribe via our contact page to get them as they publish.