G42, the Abu Dhabi-based global technology group, has announced plans to build a national-scale AI supercomputer in India in what marks one of the largest AI infrastructure collaborations between the UAE and Asia’s third-largest economy.
The Abu Dhabi company is teaming up with US AI company Cerebras Systems, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to deliver the system, G42 said in a statement.
The 8 exaflops of compute capacity supercomputer underpins the ambitions of both nations to build sovereign, high performance AI ecosystems at scale.
“Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness,” said Manu Jain, chief executive of G42 India. “This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security.”
The project announced on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit 2026 in India, follows the India-UAE Strategic Dialogue in December last year and the visit of President Sheikh Mohamed to India in January this year that solidified a comprehensive partnership framework across defence, technology, space and energy.
AI sovereignty
Hosted within India, the system will operate under “India-defined governance frameworks”, with all data remaining within national jurisdiction. The 8 exaflop computing capacity is designed to meet sovereign security and compliance requirements, and the supercomputer will serve as a foundational asset under the India AI Mission, G42 said.
Exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer and 8 exaflops means eight quintillion floating-point operations per second.
To put that into perspective: if a person makes one calculation per second non-stop, it would take them over 250 billion years to do what an 8 exaflop system can do in one second.
Once operational, the India supercomputer will be accessible to private and public sector entities from premier institutions to start-ups, small and medium enterprises, and government ministries, G42 said.
This democratised access model is designed to lower barriers to AI innovation, particularly for applications serving India's 1.4 billion citizens, it added.
Building capacities
The latest project in India, underpins G42’s commitment to support nations across continents to build domestic AI capabilities.
Earlier this month, G42 signed a framework agreement with a Vietnamese consortium to develop sovereign AI capabilities and cloud infrastructure across the South-East Asian country.
The consortium, comprising FPT Corporation and Viet Thai Group, has committed to building three data centres in Vietnam with “consumption commitments” of up to $1 billion, G42 said at the time.
In December, G42 and MBZUAI released the latest version of the open-source Hindi-English large language model (LLM), NANDA 87B, which featured 87 billion parameters.
As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies, India plays a central role in advancing regional AI innovation. The new supercomputer will help strengthen the country's ability to build, deploy and scale AI securely within its own borders, G42 said.
G42 has partnered with Cerebras on several projects and two companies in 2023 launched what was at the time the “world’s largest supercomputer” in the UAE to address challenges in health care, energy and climate action.
The two companies also joined on the Condor Galaxy project, a network of nine interconnected supercomputers, that significantly reduced AI model training time.
“Cerebras and G42 have already successfully delivered Condor Galaxy supercomputers in the United States, demonstrating how our technology is purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads at scale,” said Andy Hock, chief strategy officer at Cerebras said.
“Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives.”
The latest project, he added will help accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to address India’s needs.
