A country most Britons still file under “somewhere warm, somewhere Manchester City belong to” is now doing something the rest of us are only writing white papers about. This week an Abu Dhabi cabinet approved artificial intelligence lessons for every schoolchild in the country. It trained 22,000 teachers to deliver them. It installed 32 AI advisers to sit alongside ministers around the cabinet table. And it quietly let Bloomberg know that the state’s flagship AI company might sell a majority stake to American owners. In the same week, Britain’s cloud strategy slipped again.
The UAE has spent a decade converting oil into compute, and is now converting compute into something closer to policy influence. The story is more interesting, and less flattering to the incumbents, than the London consensus tends to assume.
The ten-year build
The date that matters is 19 October 2017, when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid announced a cabinet reshuffle that included the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. Then the strategy arrived. The strategy, adopted the following year, set eight objectives across resources, transport, tourism, health and cyber. Today it reads like a punch list, not a manifesto.
Two years later, on 16 October 2019, the world’s first graduate-only, research-based AI university was founded in Masdar City. Professor Sir Michael Brady of Oxford was interim president. Professor Eric Xing arrived from Carnegie Mellon a year later. Today, it ranks tenth in the world on CSRankings, the standard computer-science research index. A useful signal, quoted by MBZUAI’s Dezhen Song: more than 40 of the incoming PhD cohort are returning MBZUAI master’s graduates. They had every other option in the world.
Then came the flagship. G42, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, spent its first four years building what many observers assumed would become a Chinese-adjacent regional cloud. Its first serious international headline was the bid to build a COVID-testing laboratory in Masdar in 14 days. BGI would later be added to the US Entity List. That is the seed of everything that followed with Washington.
The pivot Washington bought
Between late 2023 and mid-2024, G42 did something few would have predicted: it changed sides. In careful chronology, chief executive Peng Xiao told the Financial Times in December 2023 that G42 could not work with both the US and China. By February 2024, its $10 billion 42X Fund had divested its Chinese holdings. G42 stripped Huawei kit from its data centres. Then, on 16 April 2024, Microsoft invested $ 1.5 billion in G42, took a board seat, and layered on a $1 billion developer fund. The deal came wrapped in what Microsoft called a “first-of-its-kind intergovernmental assurance agreement” between the US, UAE and G42. In June 2024, a White House official called the arrangement “generally a positive development” because it had severed Huawei ties.
That concession unlocked the last two years. On 15 May 2025, presidents Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and Donald Trump unveiled Phase 1 of a 5GW UAE-US AI Campus at Qasr Al Watan. Ten square miles, the largest such campus outside the United States, powered by nuclear, solar and gas, with its compute reserved for American hyperscalers under agreed protocols. Days later, G42 announced Stargate UAE with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank and Cisco: a 1GW cluster, with the first 200MW due online this year, running Nvidia’s newest Blackwell hardware. OpenAI’s framing: this is the first “OpenAI for Countries” deployment, and the UAE will be the first nation to enable ChatGPT nationwide.
Washington issued the chip permissions in stages. In October 2025, it approved several billion dollars of Nvidia exports. In November 2025, Commerce authorised roughly 35,000 GB300 chips, worth about $1 billion, to G42 and Saudi Arabia’s Humain. Then, on 10 July 2026, the US moved the UAE into a new country grouping and allowed licence-free exports of advanced computing kit to the UAE government, G42, Core42, and the American giants operating there. Senator Elizabeth Warren dissented on the record, citing the reported purchase of nearly half of Donald Trump’s crypto venture by a party linked to Abu Dhabi. Commerce loosened the controls anyway.
The distinctive part
Others have built sovereign AI stories. The money is startling, but it’s not what makes the UAE version different. The Atlantic Council lists the features as state direction, long-horizon strategy documents, sovereign wealth deployed through national champions, and what it charmingly calls “speedy bureaucracy”. Carnegie: a country that “seeks technological sovereignty but has not achieved independence from foreign technology” and that has used financial commitments as, in the report’s phrase, “geopolitical insurance”.
The first unusual feature is the willingness to choose. Middle powers usually hedge; the UAE, having examined the ledger, picked Washington. Among middle powers pursuing sovereign AI, “some, such as the United Arab Emirates, have picked a side”, in contrast to those trying to build a third way.
The second is the open-weights posture. Falcon, Jais and the K2 Think reasoning models are released as open-weight. K2 Think V2 is a 70-billion-parameter model that runs on Cerebras hardware and reports competitive benchmarks against much larger closed systems. Neither the American frontier labs nor Beijing is heading in that direction. Beijing is now weighing curbs on overseas access to its top models. The three-way asymmetry writes itself: the US restricts who may buy its chips; China is moving to restrict who may use its models; the UAE built a strategy on being permitted to buy the chips and giving the models away.
The third is concentration of authority. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, at last count, chairs G42, MGX, ADQ, IHC, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and ADIA; chairs the AI and Advanced Technology Council; and serves as National Security Adviser. This is why the UAE can move fast. It is also why every Washington memo about doing business with G42 begins by pointing that out.
The trade-offs
Speed and concentration bring their own costs. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report catalogues continuing civil-liberties concerns, and the Emirates’ role in Sudan’s conflict has drawn scrutiny in Washington, including a joint congressional resolution against a $1.2 billion arms sale that the UAE has firmly denied. The chip liberalisation of 10 July 2026 and these Washington debates were running on the same congressional calendar. For the AI story, the relevant question is narrower: whether the same centralised model that enables the speed also concentrates the risk if the technology bends the wrong way.
And there is the sovereignty question that Bloomberg made unignorable this week. On 4 September, Bloomberg reported that G42 was in exploratory talks over selling a majority stake to American buyers, precisely to safeguard chip access beyond the reported April 2027 horizon. A decade of sovereignty-building may end when the national champion sells control to keep buying the chips. That isn’t the sovereignty story the brochures describe. But it’s the one a rational planner probably ends up writing, when the state has no domestic silicon and an American export-control regime overhead.
What Britain might learn
Britain is not Abu Dhabi and could not be if it tried. What travels is the question.
On the numbers, the comparison is uncomfortable. Britain’s flagship national AI supercomputer, Isambard-AI at Bristol, cost £225 million, and the UK’s whole compute commitment to 2030 is £2 billion. Abu Dhabi’s MGX closed a single $49 billion fund in July; a single planned Abu Dhabi campus is 5GW. Britain is buying research capability. The UAE is buying industrial capacity. Different games at different scales.
On the machinery, the contrast is worse. In July 2026, Prime Minister Andy Burnham sacked Liz Kendall, promoted Kanishka Narayan to Minister for AI with a Cabinet seat, and scattered the remaining functions across the Cabinet Office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the new Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. The National Cloud Strategy slipped to February 2027. It has become genuinely difficult to answer the question “who runs technology policy in Britain today?” without a whiteboard.
Three things Britain could take from the Emirati playbook without adopting its politics.
The first is a planning horizon that outlasts a reshuffle. The UAE’s AI Strategy 2031 was written by one government, executed by the next, and will be judged by the one after. Britain’s has been written twice, restructured once, and is on its third home in four years.
The second is decision-making at the pace of technology. Whatever one thinks of the concentration of Emirati authority, the consequence is a country that convened a US president, signed a $1.4 trillion investment framework, and launched a 5GW campus in eighteen months. Britain took two years to publish an action plan for the AI it already had.
The third is honesty about what sovereignty means in this decade. The Emirati story is that, for anyone who is not the United States or China, sovereignty in AI means negotiating access on terms that keep the compute flowing. It does not mean autarky. It does not mean domestic silicon. It means what Carnegie called managed interdependence — and, if this week’s Bloomberg reporting holds, possibly rather more managing and rather less independence than the strategy documents implied.
For British firms — in health, in financial services, in Arabic-language technology — the practical opportunity looks like this. MGX is investing across Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Mistral’s Paris compute campus. Mubadala has run a British portfolio for years. The UAE is pressing for a bilateral CEPA that would go further, potentially including an AI chapter. The instrument for the conversation exists. Britain's strategy for it appears, at the moment, to be under redesign.
Come and argue about it
On Wednesday evening, Emirates Wire is putting the conversation in a room. “The UAE and the Widening Gulf Conflict: What Happens Next?” 9 September, at the National Liberal Club on Whitehall Place. David Waddell of the BBC chairs. Sir Oliver Dowden, until last year Deputy Prime Minister and now Chair of the UK-UAE All-Party Parliamentary Group, joins Barclays’ Middle East economist James Swanston and RUSI’s Dr Burcu Ozcelik. Arrival from six; on the record; free.
The war is the frame. The deeper question sits underneath it. Can a small state that has bet its next decade on American compute, American chips and now, possibly, American ownership of its flagship company hold a strategy together while missiles are being exchanged over the strait its oil sails through? And what does Britain want from any of it, with a trade agreement in hand, a Cabinet AI minister in post and a technology department in three pieces?
Bring the argument.
Details and registration: https://www.emirateswire.co.uk/p/the-three-people-we-are-asking-about
I hope to see some of you there.
— Steve
Steve Moore
Emirates Wire · emirateswire.co.uk · steve@emirateswire.co.uk
AI tools help with research aggregation and early drafting. I check every fact against primary sources, and I read and approve every sentence before it goes out. I don’t publish anything I haven’t personally stood behind.