TMTPOST — OpenAI on Thursday announced its first project under Stargate beyond U.S. following U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the ChatGPT maker is also considering further expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure initiative in Asia Pacific.
Credit：G42
OpenAI said it reached a new partnership to launch Stargate UAE—the first international deployment of Stargate, its AI infrastructure platform. It is also the first partnership under OpenAI for Countries, its new global initiative to help interested governments build sovereign AI capability in coordination with the U.S. government, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
OpenAI will partner with Nvidia Corporation, Oracel Corporation, Cisco Systems, Inc., Softbank Group Corp. and the UAE AI firm G42 to build a Stargate cluster with a 1 gigawatt (GW) capacity in Abu Dhabi, which is expected to go live in 2026. The new cluster is part the U.S.-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership announced during Trump’s visit last week.
The United States and the UAE planned to work together on an AI campus including 5GW of capacity of AI data centers in Abu Dhabi to support regional computation demand, while meeting robust US security standards and other efforts to responsibly deploy AI infrastructure, both in the UAE and globally, the U.S. Department of Commerce said on May 15.
The new AI campus, which will span 10 square miles, will be the largest such facility outside of the U.S., according to the department. It said G42 will build the campus and will operate it with several American companies. While not specifying G42’s U.S. partners, the department said the campus will be home to U.S. hyperscalers and large enterprises that can leverage the capacity for regional compute with the ability to serve the developing countries.
G42 in a statement called Stargate UAE a next-generation AI infrastructure cluster that will run in the newly established 5GW UAE–U.S. AI Campus in Abu Dhabi. Per the statement, Stargate UAE will be built by G42 and operated by OpenAI and Oracle. Cisco will offer its zero-trust security and AI-ready connectivity and Nvidia will supply the latest NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems.
Under the Stargate UAE partnership, the Emirate will become the first country in the world to enable ChatGPT nationwide, giving people across the country the ability to access OpenAI’s technology, OpenAI said on Thursday. It added that Stargate UAE has the potential to provide AI infrastructure and compute capacity within a 2,000-mile radius, reaching up to half the world’s population.
Neither OpenAI nor G42 disclosed the cost or investments for the new UAE project. The Wall Street Journal suggested the cost could be more than $10 billion as similar projects planned in the U.S. run well over $10 billion.
Axios learned from a source that the UAE investments through G42 could total $20 billion and outlays in the Gulf and the United States are expected to be $8 billion to $10 billion each. for every dollar the UAE invests in Stargate UAE and the broader data center project in Abu Dhabi, UAE will invest an additional dollar in U.S. AI infrastructure as well — including Stargate, the U.S. news media outlet noted.
A Bloomberg report later Thursday revealed OpenAI is also weighing possible Stargate worldwide projects in Asia Pacific. OpenAI’s Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon will visit the region next week to meet with government officials and potential private-sector partners to discuss AI infrastructure and OpenAI software use, according to its website. It was reported that Kwon will visit countries including Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and Singapore.
