Friday’s arrival of the UAE’s first shipment of Nvidia’s advanced chips underscored how firmly Abu Dhabi is pushing ahead with sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure despite regional instability and supply-chain disruption caused by the Iran war.
“The UAE is all in on American tech. We are not hedging, we are not diversifying, we're doubling down on it,” the UAE ambassador to the US, Yousef Al Otaiba, said as the country deepened its strategic AI partnership with American companies.
Mr Al Otaiba also described the UAE-US AI partnership as “the most consequential economic partnership of this decade,” highlighting the strategic importance Abu Dhabi is placing on access to advanced American chips and computing infrastructure.
Key milestones include Microsoft's $1.5 billion investment in AI and cloud company G42 in 2024, and a UAE commitment of $1.4 trillion for AI infrastructure in the US.
Friday's shipment forms part of a wider effort to build sovereign AI systems inside the UAE, allowing critical data, infrastructure and applications to remain under national control. The initiative includes a major agreement finalised in March between Nvidia and sovereign AI company Aleria for advanced AI infrastructure powered by Blackwell Ultra chips.
While the Iran war exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains and cloud infrastructure, executives leading the UAE’s sovereign AI push say the instability is accelerating demand for localised and resilient systems.
Marc Domenech, Nvidia’s vice president of enterprise for the Middle East, North Africa and Southern Europe, said the geopolitical environment had strengthened the urgency around sovereign AI systems rather than slowing investment.
“I think it’s the opposite,” Mr Domenech said. “People understood how important is it.”
Eric Leandri, chief executive of Aleria, a UAE sovereign AI infrastructure and software company, also argued that conflict was accelerating the need for sovereign AI infrastructure as governments and companies were reassessing vulnerabilities.
The concept of sovereign AI has become central to the UAE’s technology strategy. The idea centres on ensuring that highly sensitive digital operations such as health care, financial systems, defence applications and government data remain governed by domestic laws rather than by foreign cloud providers.
“We don’t need sovereign AI for most of what we do,” said Mr Leandri. “But in the 30 per cent that we do, it’s the most critical.”
This is especially the case when it comes to national security.
In a February interview with Business Extra, Ahmed Abdulla, co-founder of sovereign AI orchestration platform Haimaker.ai, said Gulf governments increasingly viewed sovereign AI as part of long-term economic diversification strategies rather than simply a technology initiative.
He said regional policymakers were aiming for AI to become a meaningful contributor to GDP across sectors including health care, logistics, financial services and government operations.
Domestic adoption is also reinforcing the UAE’s push to become a sovereign AI centre. A recent Microsoft AI diffusion report ranked the UAE among the world’s leading countries for AI adoption.
According to the report, the UAE reached 64 per cent AI adoption among the working-age population by the end of 2025, placing it ahead of countries including the US and much of Europe.
From cloud dependency to sovereign AI
Executives at the Making it in the Emirates event said the regional conflict was reshaping how AI systems are built rather than slowing development altogether.
Rather than concentrating infrastructure in a handful of giant sites, companies are increasingly exploring distributed systems that can withstand cuts, attacks or supply disruptions during periods of instability.
“We were thinking maybe [initially] of doing one centre,” said the chief executive of Aleria, a subsidiary of the International Holding Company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi and National Security Adviser, during a discussion on Business Extra. “Now we have to distribute it, especially for security reasons.”
Paul Bloch, co-founder of data intelligence platform DDN, said this was especially important in today's climate.
“You will have multiple sites, and they will be redundant to one another,” he said.
“So that if something happens, like some of the events over the past two, three months and you lose potentially one data centre, you're not losing all your production and all your access to data," he said, citing a recent example in March when drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting services across the region.
“It can happen anywhere, anytime – being able to have access to a sovereign AI factory and being able to have access from various sources and various sites – you know you're safe.”
The executives described sovereign AI as moving beyond theoretical infrastructure discussions into operation across the UAE.
Mr Bloch said AI systems are already being integrated into construction monitoring, healthcare systems and enterprise analytics. In construction, companies can use AI systems to monitor project delays and analyse return on investment in near real time.
In health care, Mr Leandri said sovereign infrastructure would allow sensitive patient data to be processed locally rather than being transferred abroad, reducing both security risks and latency.
The executives also pointed to defence applications, drone systems and video surveillance as examples of sectors where sovereign AI infrastructure would become increasingly important.
Other countries are also investing in sovereign AI initiatives to reduce dependence on foreign technology ecosystems.
Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 focuses on sovereign digital capabilities across health care, transport and public services.
France-backed Mistral AI has become central to Europe’s efforts to maintain independent AI capabilities.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy includes major investments in domestic AI and cloud infrastructure to localise advanced technologies.
Export ambitions
The focus is increasingly on use rather than experimentation.
“The time is now,” Mr Domenech said. “This is not [going to be] done in a year or two years. That’s something that has been cooking already for many years.”
Mr Leandri said operational AI factories capable of processing critical national data are expected to come online rapidly, with enterprise-ready infrastructure already being used.
“Today when you make a factory, it’s already the product,” he said.
Mr Domenech said the next wave of development would include physical AI systems, humanoid robotics and more advanced AI agents operating at scale across industries.
The executives said the UAE’s sovereign AI push is already shifting towards exports rather than remaining focused solely on domestic deployment.
This year, "we are ready", Mr Leandri said, arguing that the systems being used are already operating at production scale.
He said Aleria was already using technology in the US, Kazakhstan, Europe, South Africa and Latin America, with about 60 per cent of the company’s customers based outside the UAE.
