Jun 26, 2025

G42

Rising AI Power

Harry Booth

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Booth is a reporter at TIME.

Peng Xiao, group CEO of G42, during an interview at Bloomberg House during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.

Peng Xiao, group CEO of G42, during an interview at Bloomberg House during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.Chris Ratcliffe—Bloomberg/Getty Images

The largest AI infrastructure project outside the U.S. is now taking shape in Abu Dhabi. In May, President Trump joined United Arab Emirates officials in the Gulf state to unveil plans for a 10-sq.-mi. AI campus to be built by UAE-backed AI lab G42 and operated jointly with U.S. companies including OpenAI. G42 views other AI companies not "as competition, but [as] potential collaborators," chief marketing and communications officer Faheem Ahamed says. The campus, which will house supercomputers and a science park, is just one G42 initiative supporting UAE’s 2031 AI superpower goal. With plans for Europe’s first giga-scale AI supercomputer and other projects underway in Kenya and the U.S., G42’s footprint is now global.

Winning over Washington, however, has been key to the company’s ambitions at home. In May, the Trump administration loosened restrictions aimed at stopping AI chips from being funneled to China via other countries, allowing U.S. companies to sell cutting-edge semiconductors to the Gulf nation at scale for the first time. For U.S. firms, closer ties offer access to substantial Emirati capital and energy, and closer proximity to half the globe’s population, allowing high-speed AI services to be scaled globally faster. The thorny trade-off: giving an autocratic state with a history of surveillance and human rights abuses a greater hand in AI development. Ahamed sees things differently, however: “My humble view is that [the] UAE has one of the strongest democratic values as a society.”