A 300-megawatt data centre will be operational next year as part of a five-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus in Abu Dhabi plan as the project will also create a lot of new job opportunities, said Dr Andrew Jackson, Group Chief AI Officer, G42.

In a historic step forward for artificial intelligence and international collaboration, G42, OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, SoftBank Group, and Cisco announced a deal to build Stargate UAE , which is a next-generation AI infrastructure cluster that will run in the newly established 5-gigawatt UAE–US AI campus in the UAE capital.

“This is a massive-scale endeavour. It's going to be done in phases. We're going to keep each part of the element, one bite at a time. It starts off with a 300-megawatt outlet by next year, filled then with servers very quickly. We're already working very well, but the real landing point will come next year. Between now and then, there's a lot of work to do. We've got to get our first versions out. But I think you know, it's going to be really exciting here next year,” Jackson said during a panel discussion at the Gitex Global 2025.

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Due to the huge scale of the project, he added that this is going to be a joint effort by the companies and governments.

“We have already started a lot of the transformational work. So, in 2026, we're going to see the first wave of transformation really being realised in the UAE,” he said.

“If you want to transform a nation, it really can't just be one (entity). It needs to be many, and we can't do it all ourselves. It also brings in a lot of skills. We want to essentially transform the nation, really change the productivity of the nation, which then relates back to an improvement in GDP. We are going to move mountains together,” he said, adding that the practical work has started on building the data centres.

“It's creating jobs. We're doing a lot of different initiatives to bring AI into the workforce, but it's actually creating a whole new range of jobs. We have an initiative to employ Emiratis to really do innovation work,” he said during the panel discussion.

Rod Solaimani, head of policy and partnerships for the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, OpenAI, UK also highlighted the scale of these projects, saying,“We can't do it as one company. We can't do it as a group of companies. We can't do it with OpenAI and just the US government. So this has become a multi-company, multi-government undertaking. It sounds phenomenal, almost unworldly. It's a recipe for success or a recipe for ensuring that we've got everybody on the right page,” he said.

Mohannad Abuissa, managing director and CTO, Solutions Engineering, Cisco, Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Romania, CIS, UAE; and Mohamed Taha Benssiba, head of AI for Middle East and Africa, Oracle, USA, also took part in the panel discussion.

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