Oil-rich UAE turns to artificial intelligence to fuel economy

ABU DHABI: Deep in the Abu Dhabi desert, a massive artificial intelligence campus a quarter the size of Paris is beginning to emerge, the oil-rich UAE’s boldest bet on technology it hopes will help transform its economy.

Towering cranes clank as far, low buildings form below, the eventual home of data centers powered by five gigawatts of electricity—the largest such facility outside the United States.

The campus will provide storage and computing capacity within a radius of 3,200 kilometers (1,990 miles) covering up to four billion people, said Johan Nilerud, chief strategy officer of Khazna Data Centres, a subsidiary of Emirati artificial intelligence giant G42, which is spearheading the project.

Since the 1960s, oil has fueled the rise of the United Arab Emirates from an outpost of nomadic tribes in the desert to a Middle Eastern economic and diplomatic powerhouse.

Now, the UAE is hoping that artificial intelligence can help fill the gap when oil demand inevitably declines.

“The UAE punches above its weight because it’s a very small country that really wants to be at the forefront,” said Nilerud.

“The idea is obviously to have international partners come in … to be this AI-native nation,” he added.

The first phase of the AI ​​campus – the UAE’s one-gigawatt Stargate cluster built by G42 – will be powered by OpenAI and supported by other US tech giants such as Oracle, Cisco and Nvidia.

And last month, Microsoft announced investments of more than $15.2 billion in the UAE by 2029, after pouring $1.5 billion into the G42 last year.

Basic topic

The UAE has been betting big on AI since 2017, when it named the world’s first AI minister and became the second country after Canada to unveil a national AI strategy.

A year later, G42 was founded with the backing of Abu Dhabi-based sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. Chaired by the UAE president’s brother Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, it offers a range of artificial intelligence products and employs more than 23,000 people.

The UAE said it has pumped more than $147 billion into artificial intelligence by 2024, including up to 50 billion euros ($58 billion) into a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center in France.

“Artificial intelligence, like oil, is a cross-cutting field, which can potentially have a leverage effect and impact on different activities,” said Professor Jean-Francois Gagne of the University of Montreal.

In 2019, Abu Dhabi opened the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world’s first university dedicated to artificial intelligence. Last August, artificial intelligence became a core subject in the nation’s public schools starting in kindergarten.

MBZUAI and the Abu Dhabi Institute of Technology Innovation (TII) have since released production AI models, including Falcon, which has compared favorably with industry leaders and now has an Arabic version.

Wanting to reduce dependence on imported materials and know-how, the UAE has invested heavily in research, development and domestic cultivation programs.

TII has opened a research lab with Nvidia to “break the boundaries” of artificial intelligence production models and develop robotics systems, executive director Najwa Aaraj said.

“Sovereignty and self-sustainability and indigenous adaptation of technology to local needs are all very, very important,” said Eric Xing, president of MBZUAI. AFP.

“And also difficult to achieve if you rely solely on import and external…technical transfer.”

Chips ahoy

In the race for AI market share, the UAE is trailing behind the US and China, the clear leaders. But the small, desolate country has its advantages, mainly money and energy.

With oil, gas and year-round sun for solar power, it can quickly build power plants to power data centers — a major hurdle elsewhere.

And as the business hub of the region, with a population that is almost 90% expatriate, the UAE has the edge compared to other nations in the region.

Meanwhile, the UAE has engaged in a balancing act between the US and China as it pursues imports vital to artificial intelligence, including the specialized chips that make data centers work.

Last month, the intense lobbying paid off when the US approved the export of advanced Nvidia chips to both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

“The UAE clearly doesn’t want to be dependent on China, but that doesn’t mean they want to be dependent on the US either,” Gagne said.

But despite its progress and years of investment, success in this complex, ever-changing field is not guaranteed.

“Right now, we don’t know what the right strategy is or who the good players are,” Gagne said.

“Everyone bets on different players, but some will lose and some will win.”