Building Under Fire: Can AI Infrastructure Become a Deterrent?
“We have learned how to build in a dangerous neighbourhood,” Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States, told a technology expo in Washington on 8 May. “We will harden what needs hardening and close the gaps that were exposed.”
He was not speaking metaphorically. G42 — the Abu Dhabi AI company that sits at the centre of the UAE’s entire technology strategy — is on the IRGC’s named target list, alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Palantir. Amazon’s two UAE data centres were struck on 1 March. The Oracle facility in Dubai sustained what Data Center Dynamics confirmed as limited damage in early April. Iran has publicly identified Emirati AI infrastructure as “enemy technology infrastructure.
The UAE is building AI infrastructure while it is being targeted — and betting that keeping those networks online under fire will itself deter future attacks.
Three Things That Make the UAE Different
Most nations talk about an AI strategy. The UAE acts like a country that believes it has no choice but to lead. Three choices distinguish its approach — and matter directly for deterrence and continuity.
First: the state is the client, not just the regulator. On 22 April, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid announced that 50% of all UAE federal government sectors, services, and operations will run on “agentic AI” within two years — the government says it will set binding performance metrics for the deployment of autonomous AI at a national scale. Ministers, directors-general, and heads of federal entities will be assessed on the speed of adoption. The Cabinet simultaneously launched the UAE’s largest-ever government training programme — equipping 80,000 federal employees with agentic AI skills — and approved a national AI healthcare policy covering a new AI-powered medical system and the retraining of clinical staff. Sheikh Mohammed called it the start of “UAE Government 4.0.” Deputy Prime Minister Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed will personally oversee the transformation. (By “agentic AI,” officials mean AI systems that can take multi-step actions towards a goal with minimal human prompting, under human supervision.) That makes the continuity of AI services a national resilience issue, not just a tech issue.
Second: it moved earlier and more structurally than anyone gave it credit for. In 2017, the UAE appointed the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence — Omar Sultan Al Olama, who still holds the role. The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Masdar City is the world’s first graduate-level university dedicated exclusively to AI research, aiming — in Bloomberg’s phrase — to become “the Stanford of the Gulf.” Abu Dhabi’s National AI Strategy 2031 predates most Western equivalents by years. The result is a deeper bench of policy and talent to run crisis playbooks.
Third: it solved the chip problem through geopolitics. The central constraint on any serious AI programme is compute. The UAE has tried to break that constraint by making itself indispensable to Washington. Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42 in 2024 and, in November 2025, a further $15.2 billion in UAE AI infrastructure, taking a board seat and security commitments in return. The US Commerce Department approved the export of around 35,000 next-generation Nvidia GPUs to G42. Reuters and Silicon UK have reported a framework covering up to 500,000 advanced chips per year through to at least 2027. The first batch of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra data centre GPUs reportedly arrived in the UAE this month — the world’s most powerful AI chips, now sitting in Abu Dhabi. More than 21,500 Nvidia AI GPUs are already operating across UAE facilities, according to industry estimates, more than in any other country in the region.
The security condition attached to all of it: G42 agreed to mirror capacity and operations in the US and accept US-origin compliance and access controls. G42 must restrict access for nationals of countries on the US arms embargo or Entity lists — which, in practice, means China. The UAE paid a political price for its access to compute. It chose to pay it. That choice also creates a sovereignty chokepoint if Washington tightens controls during a crisis.
The Global South Bridge
The UAE’s AI ambition does not stop at its own borders. It is positioning itself as the technology infrastructure hub for Africa and the developing world — the bridge between US frontier AI and markets that Western platforms have barely touched.
The most concrete expression of this is the $1 billion geothermal-powered Microsoft-G42 data centre in Olkaria, Kenya, which would create the first Microsoft Azure cloud region in East Africa. G42 CEO Peng Xiao has said the facility will ultimately operate at up to 1 gigawatt — sufficient to support AI services and cloud computing for Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania. The project has hit energy guarantee disputes with the Kenyan government, but negotiations are ongoing.
Alongside the infrastructure play, Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has built Falcon — a family of open-source large language models that now includes Falcon-H1 Arabic, ranked first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard across all model sizes. It outperforms models with several times more parameters. Falcon Arabic covers Modern Standard Arabic and major dialects — Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian — and is built for markets that ChatGPT, trained on English-first data, does not serve well. This is sovereign AI designed for export: the UAE as an AI infrastructure provider for 400 million Arabic speakers and, via the Kenya model, for Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Vulnerability Nobody Has a Doctrine For
The SCMP’s framing — the UAE as an AI bridge to the Global South — is accurate and important. What it does not address is the structural tension the war has exposed.
The UAE’s AI infrastructure is concentrated, visible, and now explicitly targeted. Iran named G42, Oracle, Microsoft, and Nvidia in the same IRGC target list. The Stargate AI data centre in Abu Dhabi has been directly threatened. War risk insurance premiums on UAE tech infrastructure have risen sharply. CNBC classified UAE AI infrastructure as “on the frontlines” as recently as 15 May.
The UAE has sovereign cloud, Patriot and THAAD batteries forming its integrated national air-defence network, and an Israeli-operated Iron Dome battery — the first time the system has been stationed outside Israel — deployed on UAE soil since April. Add US security guarantees and the al-Otaiba doctrine of hardening and adapting. What it does not yet have is a publicly stated doctrine for protecting civilian AI infrastructure during active kinetic conflict. Nor is the build-out frictionless internally: surveys show 80% of UAE organisations include AI in their core strategy, but 42% face significant internal resistance to change — a gap between leadership ambition and organisational readiness that the two-year agentic government deadline will test.
What would deterrence-by-uptime actually require? At minimum: geographic redundancy across emirates so no single strike cluster takes down critical services; pre-agreed continuity tiers so agentic government systems fail gracefully rather than catastrophically; and a sovereignty safeguard for the scenario in which Washington tightens chip export controls mid-crisis. None of that is publicly in place. The question is whether Abu Dhabi builds it before it needs it — or after.
The Line
The UAE is trying to turn AI infrastructure into a deterrent — a bet that only works if the networks keep running when the drones don’t stop.
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Sources
South China Morning Post — UAE ditches oil for AI to build Global South tech ‘bridge’ (17 May 2026)
Gulf News — UAE launches country’s largest government training programme targeting 80,000 federal employees (Apr 2026)
Khaleej Times — Sheikh Mohammed announces 50% of UAE govt services to run on Agentic AI (22 Apr 2026)
Bloomberg — UAE’s AI University Aims to Become Stanford of the Gulf (23 May 2025)
Microsoft — Microsoft’s $15.2 billion USD investment in the UAE (Nov 2025)
Observer — US Approves Advanced Chip Sales to G42 — 500,000 per year deal (Nov 2025)
Reuters / Silicon UK — US nears deal with UAE on advanced AI chips — 500,000 per year (May 2025)
Reuters — UAE bolsters economic ties with US by joining Pax Silica (Jan 2026)
Euronews — Iran threatens Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, G42 and other tech firms with attacks (Apr 2026)
Data Center Dynamics — Iran attack hits Oracle data center in Dubai, causes limited damage (Apr 2026)
CNBC — UAE AI infrastructure on the ‘frontlines’ (15 May 2026)
Times of Israel — US envoy confirms Israel sent Iron Dome to UAE (11 May 2026)
Data Center Knowledge — Microsoft, G42 Announce $1B Geothermal Data Center in Kenya (Jan 2025)
Ubergizmo — Microsoft’s Kenya AI Data Center stalled over energy guarantees (15 May 2026)
IT Brief UK — UAE’s Falcon-H1 Arabic tops Open Arabic LLM rankings (Jan 2026)
Analytics Insight UAE — UAE AI Push: 80% Firms Have Strategy, 42% Face Change Resistance (Feb 2026)
Analytics Insight UAE — Why Dubai and Abu Dhabi Are Becoming Global AI Hubs (May 2026)
World Economic Forum — Omar Sultan Al Olama — world’s first Minister of State for AI