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The United Arab Emirates is reportedly reworking plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project jointly with the U.S., looking to spread facilities across the country and add underground sites and air defenses after Iranian missile and drone attacks.
The project, first announced during U.S. President Donald Trump's visit to the UAE in May 2025, was originally planned as a 10-square-mile (26-square-kilometer) campus in Abu Dhabi but will now likely consist of a network of data centers across the UAE, sources told Reuters.
Under the U.S.-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, the two countries agreed to cooperate more closely on critical technologies, including a 1-gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi within a planned 5-gigawatt UAE-U.S. AI technology cluster.
The cluster is intended to provide the computing power needed for growing AI demand across the region while meeting U.S. security standards. Known as Stargate UAE, the first phase of the $30-billion, 1-gigawatt facility is already under construction, with its first 200 megawatts expected to come online this year, the report suggested.
G42, an AI company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE national security adviser and brother of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leads the project with U.S. technology companies.
The company told Reuters that work on the AI campus is progressing as planned, while noting that the project's specifics are under continuous review to meet the security, resilience, and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale.
The report suggested that some modifications are being considered to protect the first-phase site from aerial attacks, while the rest of the project will likely be spread across multiple locations. Officials are also considering underground facilities, with sites holding sensitive data, including military information, potentially built inside mountains.
The redesign includes air defenses such as drone and missile interceptors and electronic jamming equipment. Other measures include blast-resistant concrete, backup power, and cooling systems.
Emirati officials began reviewing their AI infrastructure plans after Tehran started firing missiles and drones at Gulf neighbors that host American forces in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran, the report said.
Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE were directly hit by drone strikes in March, while a drone strike near an AWS facility in Bahrain also caused physical damage. The strikes damaged infrastructure, disrupted power and, in some cases, led to fire suppression efforts that caused additional water damage, AWS said.
The damage disrupted cloud services across both regions, affecting services including Amazon EC2, S3, DynamoDB and Lambda. In the UAE, two of the region's three availability zones were significantly impaired, while one continued to operate normally, according to AWS. The company warned that recovery would take time because of the extent of the physical damage.
Iran's armed forces warned in April that Stargate UAE could be a potential target and released a video showing a map of the planned complex. People familiar with the project confirmed to the outlet that the site is near Al Dhafra Air Base, which hosts U.S. troops and has been targeted during the war.
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