The United Arab Emirates reinforced its position as a global digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence hub in 2025, achieving a 97 percent utilisation rate of AI tools across government entities and surpassing 450,000 programmers nationwide. The year marked a turning point in the country’s AI journey, driven by large-scale international partnerships, record investments, and rapid deployment of AI across public services, education, and critical infrastructure.
A defining milestone was the launch of a 5-gigawatt UAE–US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi, the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States, powered by a mix of nuclear, solar, and gas energy. The initiative was complemented by the announcement of Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt project involving G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank, and Nvidia, with its first phase expected to go live in 2026 using NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems.
The UAE also expanded AI cooperation with Europe through a strategic framework with France, covering a dedicated 1-gigawatt data centre, advanced semiconductors, renewable energy, and shared research platforms. On the investment front, UAE-based MGX joined global partners including BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, and xAI in an AI Infrastructure Partnership targeting next-generation data centres and energy systems, with potential investments of up to $100 billion.
International development featured prominently in the UAE’s AI agenda, with a $1 billion commitment to the G20-backed AI for Development initiative supporting projects across Africa, alongside a $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation to advance AI-driven agricultural development. Domestically, AI-related investments exceeded AED543 billion across 2024 and 2025, with major commitments from global firms such as Microsoft and KKR.
Technological innovation accelerated with the launch of Jais 2, a 70-billion-parameter language model trained on a 600-billion-token Arabic-first dataset, and K2 Think, an open-source AI reasoning system. The UAE also introduced the world’s first “AI in the Ring” index to measure how closely AI models align with national culture and values.
AI adoption expanded rapidly across government and industry. A national study showed 44 percent of entities using high-performance computing across 91 specialised use cases in healthcare, finance, and security. The government launched the world’s first AI-driven legislative system, an AI HR assistant serving over 50,000 employees, and automated more than 100 government services. In education, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University reported a 95 percent reduction in faculty workload through AI agents.
The year concluded with the launch of a Cybersecurity Excellence Centre in partnership with Google Cloud, expected to create over 20,000 jobs and further strengthen the UAE’s national digital and cybersecurity ecosystem.
