Technology and Science28 August, 20262 min read
United Arab Emirates Backs Trump to Build $30 Billion Five-Gigawatt AI Campus
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
UAE views Trump as key partner to build a five-gigawatt, $30 billion AI campus. The AI campus project was announced last year as a US-UAE partnership.
UAE bets on AI campus
The United Arab Emirates is betting big on artificial intelligence and sees President Donald Trump as its champion, with Trump’s announcement last year that the United States and the UAE would partner to build a five-gigawatt, $30 billion AI campus. The Washington Post says the UAE’s ambitions were limited by the Biden administration’s guardrails on the proliferation of sensitive U.S. technology to certain countries, while the Trump administration “recently made it easier for the UAE to access American AI chips.”
Talal Al Kaissi, the chief global affairs officer at G42, said the industry is in a race to get infrastructure up and running, with “adoption and responsible diffusion now the name of the game.” Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said Trump’s announcements reflected a shift away from the Biden administration’s limits on exports of AI chips and models, adding that “Their idea was that we need to diffuse American infrastructure, that we want to be everywhere.”
Partnerships, chips, and scrutiny
The Washington Post reports that Trump’s announcements were met with skepticism in Washington, with worries they would result in intelligence leaks to China, and it also notes accusations that Trump is too closely tied in business to Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser who oversees G42. In a separate report, TradingView says Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s chairman role at G42 intersects with U.S. export policy, noting that “The United States authorized the export of advanced AI chips to G42 in November 2025.”
TradingView also reports that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Company conditional preliminary approval on August 14, and that its decision confirms StringZ is an investor in WLTC Holdings and signed commitments not to influence the bank. The Washington Post adds that the UAE’s AI industry is tied to broader U.S.-China competition for commercially successful AI technology, and it quotes Abdulkhaleq Abdulla saying the UAE has “made the decision to spend as much on digital infrastructure.”
Africa data centres and capacity
MTN Digital Infrastructure announced it entered into a strategic partnership with a UAE-based data centre investment platform to accelerate the development of AI-ready digital infrastructure platforms across Africa, pursuing the work through Africa Data Hub Holding Limited. Capacity Media reports that MTN’s half-year results for the six months to 30 June 2026 disclosed the partnership and that “For now, only in South Africa and Nigeria, we are in that partnership, looking at 150MW as phase 1,” with MTN saying it will build out as demand requires.
Capacity Media identifies the UAE-based partner as Dubai-based data centre developer Tarek Al Ashram, founder of Gulf Data Hub, and says Bayobab is also a shareholder and will provide open access connectivity and go-to-market support through its pan-African network. The Fast Mode frames the same MTN partnership as a milestone in MTN’s Ambition 2030 strategy, saying the platform will help address growing demand for cloud, enterprise, digital and AI-enabled services across the continent, with an initial focus on South Africa and Nigeria.