The United Arab Emirates is redrawing the blueprint for one of the largest AI buildouts outside the United States, trading a single mega campus for a distributed network of hardened sites.
Sources told Reuters that the roughly 10-square-mile UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi is likely to be split across several locations. Options under study include burying sensitive loads underground or in mountains, plus air defenses, blast-hardened construction and more resilient backup power and cooling.
The recalculation came after Iranian drone and missile attacks damaged AWS sites in the UAE and Bahrain in March, followed in April by an Iranian video that flagged the Stargate UAE site near Al Dhafra Air Base as a target.
G42 leads the effort, first unveiled during President Donald Trump’s visit last year, with Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco and SoftBank’s Stargate venture in support. Construction on the first phase, the $30B, 1-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster, is expected to continue with added hardening. An initial 200 megawatts was due online this year.
G42 said work is progressing as planned and that project details remain under continuous security and resilience review.
For the wider AI industry, the shift is a reminder that compute concentration has become a geopolitical risk. Operators weighing where to place gigawatt-scale capacity now face a trade-off between the efficiency of one site and the fragility of a single failure domain.
