The United Arab Emirates is quietly redrawing one of the largest AI infrastructure projects outside the United States — a 5-gigawatt data-center complex built around the Stargate initiative — after Iranian missile and drone strikes in the Gulf forced a rethink of how and where sovereign AI capacity should be built, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
From one Abu Dhabi campus to a distributed network
The UAE-US AI Campus was announced during U.S. President Donald Trump's visit last year and originally envisaged as a single 10-square-mile (26 sq km) site in Abu Dhabi. Sources now say the buildout will comprise a network of data centers spread across the UAE, with authorities weighing air defenses, blast-resistant concrete, extra backup power and cooling, and — for facilities handling sensitive military and government data — construction inside mountain complexes in Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah.
The first phase, a $30-billion, 1-gigawatt cluster branded Stargate UAE, broke ground last year near Al Dhafra Air Base, which hosts U.S. troops. About 200 megawatts of that phase is due online this year, and construction is expected to continue as planned, with modifications to protect the site from aerial attacks.
Iran targets U.S.-linked cloud in the Gulf
Emirati officials began reviewing the blueprint after Tehran fired missiles and drones at Gulf neighbors hosting American forces in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE were damaged in March along with one in Bahrain, and Amazon's cloud services in the region remain partially disrupted. In April Iran's armed forces released a video that named Stargate UAE as a potential target, complete with a map of the campus location.
The project is led by G42, the AI conglomerate controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, in partnership with Stargate joint-venture members OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, plus Nvidia and Cisco. In return for access to Nvidia's AI chips and other advanced U.S. technology, the UAE agreed to cut AI ties with China and invest in Stargate's American data centers.
AI compute joins the list of critical strategic assets
The redesign is a live case study of a shift already underway in the industry: hyperscale compute is no longer just an economic asset but a piece of national security infrastructure whose concentration invites strike planning. Related coverage: the Pentagon's $5B loan to Fluidstack, Oracle's $638B RPO surge and Microsoft's 38 GW plan.
Reporting based on coverage from Reuters, Al-Monitor and Data Center Dynamics.