Industry Findings: The UAE’s compute landscape is evolving toward sovereign-scale AI infrastructure, shaped by national ambitions to lead in regulated innovation, advanced research and hyperscale digital services. A major non-vendor policy event occurred when the National Programme for Artificial Intelligence advanced updated federal AI governance guidelines in Oct-2024, outlining expectations for model transparency, data-use accountability and infrastructure readiness across ministries and critical sectors. This directive tightened procurement parameters, pushing buyers to favour accelerators with auditable telemetry, deterministic performance envelopes and integration support for sovereign cloud zones. Near term, enterprises and government entities will prioritise memory-rich processors suited for large-batch inference and regulated model training. Medium term, UAE’s rapidly expanding AI supercomputing footprint will reward suppliers offering fabric-level orchestration, power-aware scaling and certified observability tools, accelerating demand for heterogenous accelerator stacks aligned with national digital-first policies.
Industry Player Insights: UAE’s industry path is being shaped by G42, Microsoft, Oracle, and Huawei Cloud etc. G42 expanded the “Condor Galaxy” AI supercomputing network through 2024–2025, increasing regional access to high-density GPU clusters for large-scale model training. Microsoft strengthened its UAE presence in 2024 with expanded Azure high-performance compute zones customised for regulated workloads and government cloud requirements. Oracle grew its Dubai and Abu Dhabi cloud regions in 2024–2025, enhancing availability of AI-accelerated OCI services. Huawei Cloud increased adoption of Ascend-backed AI stacks through new regional enterprise deployments in 2024. Together, these vendor actions broaden access to sovereign-aligned compute, compress deployment cycles for regulated workloads and incentivise integrators to offer turnkey accelerator-ready platforms.