ABU DHABI (Realist English). Major American tech firms including Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, and OpenAI are backing the “UAE Stargate” artificial intelligence data center announced this week, multiple sources familiar with the project confirmed Friday.
The vast complex, to be built in Abu Dhabi by Emirati firm G42, is expected to become one of the most powerful AI hubs in the world. The U.S. Commerce Department, which formally announced the initiative, described it as a 5-gigawatt facility covering 10 square miles.
A person with direct knowledge of the project confirmed that Nvidia will provide the latest Blackwell GB300 AI chips, with the first phase set to include a 1-gigawatt compute cluster. This deployment will mirror the architecture of the U.S.-based Stargate AI infrastructure, announced earlier this year by President Donald Trump following his return to office.
Oracle is also participating, according to a separate source, while co-founder Larry Ellison appeared alongside Trump during the launch of the U.S. Stargate program. Other key figures present in the UAE this week included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, and Cisco President Jeetu Patel.
The UAE Stargate marks a deepening technological alliance between Washington and Abu Dhabi, with AI infrastructure increasingly framed as a strategic priority under the Trump administration’s national competitiveness agenda. Cisco, Nvidia, and OpenAI declined to comment publicly on the project.
The UAE project is closely linked to ongoing Stargate initiatives in the U.S., with OpenAI confirming in February that it is evaluating 16 potential sites across the United States. States under consideration include Texas, California, Florida, New York, Arizona, and Ohio, among others. Construction of the first U.S. facility in Abilene, Texas, is underway and slated for completion by mid-2026.
Earlier this week, while attending the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang announced a deal to sell 18,000 Blackwell chips to Humain, a Saudi AI company planning to build 500 megawatts of data center capacity. AMD has also committed to supplying chips to the same initiative, with $10 billion in funding pledged by Humain.
The UAE Stargate project represents a new frontier in AI geopolitics, where infrastructure, silicon, and global alliances converge. With backing from the largest names in American tech and political endorsement from the Trump administration, this data corridor linking Abu Dhabi and the U.S. could redefine the balance of power in AI development — with Washington, not Beijing, leading the charge across Eurasia.
