The United Arab Emirates spent 2025 making giant strides in the field of artificial intelligence emerging as a global powerhouse in the highly competitive sector. By decisively tightening its grip on the future of digital infrastructure, it emerged not just as a regional leader but as one of its most advanced global laboratories. By the end of the year, 97 percent of government entities were actively using AI tools, the highest utilization anywhere in the world, while the domestic pool of programmers crossed 450,000, reflecting a workforce increasingly focused on code rather than oil or tourism.
Global partnerships boost AI ambition
The scale of the UAE’s ambition was most visible in its international partnerships. At the centre of these efforts stood the launch of a 5 gigawatt UAE-US AI campus in Abu Dhabi, a project that instantly redrew the global supercomputing map. Designed to serve billions of users worldwide, the campus will be powered by a diversified mix of nuclear, solar, and gas energy, making it the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States. For Abu Dhabi, it marked a symbolic and strategic moment, positioning the capital as a cornerstone of global AI infrastructure rather than a peripheral player.
That momentum continued with the unveiling of the Stargate UAE project, a 1 gigawatt initiative bringing together G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank, and Nvidia. Using NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, the project is expected to come online in phases, with its first deployment scheduled for 2026. Industry executives have described it as a testbed for next generation AI workloads that demand unprecedented computing and energy efficiency.
UAE also strengthened its ties within Europe, as it deepened its cooperation with France through a comprehensive AI framework. The agreement includes plans for a dedicated 1 gigawatt data centre and extends into joint work on renewable energy, advanced semiconductor development and shared research platforms. The framework reflects a broader UAE strategy of anchoring AI growth within energy transition and industrial policy rather than treating it as a standalone technology.
Investment activity further reinforced that strategy as Abu Dhabi based MGX joined forces with BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft, Nvidia, and xAI under a new AI Infrastructure Partnership aimed at building the next wave of data centres and energy systems. The initiative carries a potential investment purse of up to $100 billion, underlining how AI has become a core asset class rather than a speculative bet.
A commitment to push AI for development
But it wasn’t just about commercial returns. The UAE also sought to position AI as a development tool. At the G20 summit, it committed $1 billion to the AI for Development initiative, targeting projects across Africa, and partnered with the Gates Foundation on a $200 million program designed to build AI ecosystems supporting global agricultural development.
At home, AI related investments between 2024 and 2025 exceeded AED 543 billion, with major global tech firms including Microsoft and KKR announcing large scale commitments to the UAE market. These inflows have helped accelerate the country’s transition from AI adoption to AI creation.
That shift was evident in the release of Jais 2, a 70 billion parameter language model trained on – according to official claims – the largest Arabic first dataset ever assembled. The model was trained on 600 billion Arabic tokens, a scale that no other institution has attempted, addressing a long standing gap in high quality Arabic language AI. Alongside it, the UAE also introduced K2 Think, an open source system designed for advanced AI reasoning, adding to a growing portfolio of domestically developed models.
Integrating culture with technology
With business integration, digital governance, and multi-billion dollar deals, The UAE also made sure to align AI with culture with the launch of the AI in the Ring index marked the world’s first attempt to systematically measure how closely AI models reflect national culture and values. A national study published during the year found that 44 percent of entities in the UAE now use high performance computing across 91 specialized use cases spanning healthcare, finance, and security.
The public sector was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this technological integration. The government introduced what it described as the world’s first AI driven legislative system, capable of analyzing laws and forecasting policy impacts. An AI powered human resources assistant was also rolled out across government, now serving more than 50,000 employees and automating 108 services.
Education institutions reported similar gains with Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University saying the deployment of AI agents had reduced faculty workload by 95 percent while delivering measurable improvements in student performance, offering a glimpse into how AI could reshape learning at scale.
Cybersecurity rounded out the year’s milestones. The UAE Cabinet announced the establishment of a Cybersecurity Excellence Centre in partnership with Google Cloud, a move expected to generate more than 20,000 jobs and strengthen the country’s digital defence ecosystem.