No country in the world agreed artificial intelligence faster than United Arab Emirates – and the aspirations of the Middle East cultural community to be the bridge of AI to the Global South have achieved another major result with the delivery of the most sophisticated chips designed by the United States.
But those desires are carried out in a hostile environment. In the middle of US-Israel war against IranTehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has repeatedly taken aim at the Emirati’s massive data centers, developed in partnership with major US technology companies, forcing government planners to pivot and adapt.
“We have learned how to build in a dangerous neighborhood,” Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States, told a technology fair in Washington on May 8. “We will strengthen what needs to be hardened and fill the gaps that were exposed.”
The UAE’s AI strategy is built around, on the one hand, extensive, capital-intensive investments in border US technology companies and, on the other hand, the development and export of large-scale language structures to markets that are not served by Western platforms such as ChatGPT.
The arrival of the first batch of the next generation Nvidia Blackwell Ultra data center GPUs earlier this month – following Washington’s approval of the sale of advanced graphics processing units last November – brought that second pillar of its strategy one step closer to reality.
Vincent Charles, an AI expert and professor of management science at Queen’s University Belfast, told This Week in Asia that there was already strong evidence to suggest the Emirati government was implementing its plan to become a major AI deployment market and infrastructure provider for Global South.
