Construction work on the first phase of the Stargate UAE project is “going full steam ahead” and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2026, the head of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund said.
More than 100,000 cubic metres of concrete was poured to build the first 200 megawatts of the 1-gigawatt AI infrastructure, enough to create the foundations of an entire city block, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, managing director and group chief executive of Mubadala, said.
Showing a time-lapse video of the project's progress since its announcement in May, he said the current steelworks weigh 1.5 times as much as the Eiffel Tower. More than 5,000 workers are on site to build the initial phase of one of the largest AI clusters outside the US. The 19.2-square kilometre campus is about nine times the size of Monaco.
“That first phase of 200MW will be in place and ready at some point in the third quarter of next year,” Mr Al Mubarak told the Milken Institute's Middle East and Africa Summit on Friday.
Stargate UAE is being developed by Khazna Data Centres, a G42 company, along with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank, within the 5GW UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi.
It will be the largest AI data centre, forming part of a system of OpenAI-linked data centres around the world and marking a further vote of confidence in the UAE's capabilities to host large-scale tech critical to today's economic, societal and business needs.
Last month, the US authorised the export of Nvidia's powerful AI chips to G42. The Mubadala-backed company can purchase the equivalent of up to 35,000 of Nvidia's Blackwell chips (GB300s), the Commerce Department said.
The UAE currently has a “couple of thousand” chips, so going up to 35,000 chips through this agreement is “like going from a speed of 5km an hour to about 250km an hour,” Mr Al Mubarak said. “This is the speed of how we are moving and executing on this project.”
In October, G42 said the full buildout of Stargate UAE was expected in three years.
