G42, OpenAI & NVIDIA Unite to Build ‘Stargate UAE’—World’s Biggest AI Cluster Outside the U.S.

The UAE has green-lit Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI compute cluster anchoring a vast 5-GW UAE-U.S. AI Campus in Abu Dhabi. Backed by G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank and Cisco, the site will pack state-of-the-art Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, zero-trust networking and low-carbon power from nuclear, solar and gas. The first 200-MW slice is slated to spin up in 2026, giving researchers and businesses nation-scale horsepower for everything from drug discovery to financial modeling.

Stargate UAE springs from the freshly minted U.S.–UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, inked last week in the presence of Presidents Mohamed bin Zayed and Donald Trump. While the UAE pours resources into the Gulf facility, Emirati investors will funnel capital back into “Stargate U.S.” under Washington’s new America First Investment Policy—an economic two-way street meant to cement trust and safeguard sovereign data on both continents.

Peng Xiao of G42 calls the project a “bridge rooted in trust and ambition,” while OpenAI’s Sam Altman hails it as the maiden outpost of his “OpenAI for Countries” initiative. With Cisco wiring the fabric, Oracle providing AI-optimized cloud, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang dubbing AI “the most transformative force of our time,” the partners claim the cluster will democratize advanced models, slash inference latency across the Middle East, and push global innovation into overdrive.