{"id":41997,"date":"2026-05-18T02:18:19","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T02:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/41997\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T02:18:19","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T02:18:19","slug":"uae-ditches-oil-for-ai-to-build-global-south-tech-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/41997\/","title":{"rendered":"UAE ditches oil for AI to build Global South tech \u2018bridge\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

No country on Earth has adopted artificial intelligence<\/a> faster than the United Arab Emirates<\/a> \u2013 and the Middle Eastern cultural crossroad\u2019s ambitions to become an AI bridge to the Global South just got another major leg up with the delivery of the latest, cutting-edge US-designed chips.But those ambitions are taking shape in a hostile environment. Amid the US-Israel war on Iran<\/a>, Tehran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has repeatedly taken aim at major Emirati data centres, developed in partnership with American technology giants, forcing government planners to pivot and adapt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have learned how to build in a dangerous neighbourhood,\u201d Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE\u2019s ambassador to the US, told a technology expo in Washington on May 8. \u201cWe will harden what needs hardening and close the gaps that were exposed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UAE\u2019s AI strategy is structured around, on the one hand, deep, capital-intensive investments in frontier US technology firms and, on the other, the development and export of large language models to markets that are underserved by Western platforms such as ChatGPT<\/a>.The arrival of the first batch of next-generation Nvidia<\/a> Blackwell Ultra data centre GPUs earlier this month \u2013 following Washington\u2019s authorisation of the advanced graphics processing units\u2019 export last November \u2013 brought that second pillar of its strategy one step closer to reality.\"NvidiaNvidia CEO Jensen Huang displays a next-generation AI data centre platform and GPU architecture during a keynote address at a developers conference in San Jose, California, on March 16. Photo: AFPVincent Charles, an AI specialist and professor of management science at Queen\u2019s University Belfast, told This Week in Asia that there was already strong evidence to suggest the Emirati government was executing on its plan to become a leading AI deployment market and infrastructure provider for the Global South<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No country on Earth has adopted artificial intelligence faster than the United Arab Emirates \u2013 and the Middle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[25556,3259,24,25,25558,580,387,25554,21623,3254,1118,369,3255,25561,320,58,25557,25562,25559,25555,3702,25560,1594,11124,156,2187],"class_list":["post-41997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-abu-dhabi","tag-africa","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bahrain","tag-chatgpt","tag-china","tag-dubai","tag-g42","tag-global-south","tag-huawei","tag-iran","tag-kenya","tag-kuwait","tag-microsoft","tag-nvidia","tag-oman","tag-opec","tag-pax-silica","tag-queens-university-belfast","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-swahili-english","tag-tehran","tag-uae","tag-us","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}