Last week, I had the privilege of visiting the United Arab Emirates as part of a fact-finding mission organized by the Middle East Institute and sponsored by the UAE embassy in D.C.. The purpose of the trip was to learn about the UAE’s AI strategy from senior officials and business leaders in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
As a proponent of chip export controls on China, I was under no illusions as to why I was among the cohort of think tankers invited. The UAE sits at the intersection of the U.S.-China relationship as both one of China’s major trading partners and the site of the UAE-U.S. AI Campus: a 5 GW data center project led by G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI cloud company, in partnership with Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco Systems, and Softbank. The first phase of the project is a 1 GW compute cluster called Stargate UAE that is set to begin operating in 2026 with OpenAI as its anchor tenant and co-operator.
G42 previously held stakes in Chinese companies such as ByteDance and engaged deeply in China’s tech and biotech sectors. U.S. intelligence agencies also learned in 2022 that G42 allegedly provided Huawei with technology later used used by the PLA to extend the range of their air-to-air missiles. Many U.S. lawmakers and policy analysts have thus had concerns that U.S. tech investments in G42 — and the UAE more broadly — could transfer sensitive IP and technologies to Chinese entities, potentially including model weights and advanced chips. However, with the May 2025 announcement of the U.S.–UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, a bilateral framework for technology cooperation that includes Stargate UAE, the tide in Washington has clearly turned.
