When the UAE appointed Omar Sultan Al Olama as the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in 2017, he promised to make the UAE the world’s most prepared country for Artificial Intelligence. Only six years later, Al Olama was listed Time magazine’s inaugural TIME100 AI list and Abu Dhabi was well on its way in implementing its digital strategy.
However, after the United States and Israel attacked Iran in February 2026, the UAE became one of Iran’s key targets: during the war, thousands of Iranian missile and drone attacks were targeted at local offices and data centers operated by global companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
News magazine The Conversation informedThe war also raised questions about the security of undersea cables that are essential to data centers and other digital infrastructure. In addition, hardware deliveries were delayed due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran and later the United States.
“Data centers have long become critical infrastructure and need to be better protected, just like oil refineries or desalination plants,” Sebastian Sans, a senior researcher at the German think tank CARPO, told DW.
UAE’s flexibility
Despite the war’s impact on the Gulf state, observers say not everything has changed. “The political risk profile has changed, but the fundamentals have not,” Mohammed Suleiman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told DW. “While the UAE is still located at the crossroads of capital flows between East and West, it still has the energy, land and political will to build AI capabilities at scale,” he said.
In the past, the Gulf region has faced various crises, from the financial crisis of the late 2000s to the COVID-19 pandemic and previous Gulf conflicts, all of which tested the Gulf business model, Sebastian Sans recalls, “Throughout all these crises, the UAE has demonstrated a high level of resilience and has found ways to reinvent itself and deal with such strategic situations.” In his view, long-term damage would only be caused if the Iran conflict continued for a longer period of time and the UAE could not find a way to adapt its business model.
However, it remains to be seen how the UAE’s global reckoning diplomacy strategy will pan out in the short, medium and long term. In May, a planned $1 billion mega-data-center project in Kenya was called off, Business Insider Africa Informed.
Academic Business Strategies
It may also be that Abu Dhabi’s AI strategy is already diverse enough to withstand the Iran crisis.
At the center of Abu Dhabi’s ambitions is the G42, a billion-dollar Abu Dhabi-based group founded in 2018 that specializes in artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
In 2019, the UAE inaugurated the Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), the world’s first graduate-level university solely dedicated to AI with the ambition of making it the “Stanford of the Middle East”.
For some time, the UAE also tried to position itself as a technological swing state between the US and China. However, this balancing act came under scrutiny by Washington and in 2023, according to a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the UAE severed all AI ties with China.
At the moment, Abu Dhabi is developing the Stargate UAE project, a huge cluster of data centers for OpenAI and other American companies.
The project covers an area the size of Monaco and is expected to be the world’s largest data center outside the United States. According to various industry sources, 35 to 58 data centers are currently operational in the UAE.
quality issues
UAE salaries easily compete with Silicon Valley salaries, but the UAE has yet to join the top tier of the global AI engineering pool, according to a 2026 report from the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
“Despite massive investment, much of the region’s AI ecosystem relies on foundational models, algorithms and benchmarks developed elsewhere, making it a consumer rather than a primary producer,” Fatima Abu Salem, a professor of computer science at the American University of Beirut, told DW. “This dependence is reinforced by reliance on expatriate expertise and foreign academic institutions for advanced research, training and validation,” he said.
For example, researchers have criticized the quality of Arabic AI models such as the UAE’s Jais. He told DW, speaking on condition of anonymity, that he found Jace’s results to be “surprisingly bad.” In September 2025, the university launched “K2 Think”, an open-source AI reasoning model. Nevertheless, independent researchers stated that the performance of the K2 Think model was overstated.
However, as observer Sebastian Sans points out, “At this point, the UAE has invested so much in its AI strategy that changing it will not be an option.” In his view, this is more than a good project for the UAE, it is about becoming an irreplaceable and leading key player in the region.
This echoes a sentence by Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for AI Technology. In early 2018, he already said: “data There’s new oil.”
This article was originally published in Arabic.