UAE's $30B Stargate AI Campus Gets a Wartime Redesign

The UAE's most significant AI infrastructure bet is being rebuilt while under construction. According to a Reuters report citing six sources, including a US official, a Western diplomat and industry executives, the UAE is revising the master plan for Stargate UAE, its flagship AI campus, moving from a single consolidated 26-square-kilometre site near Abu Dhabi toward a distributed network of smaller, hardened facilities. The new design under consideration includes underground or mountain-based construction, air defence systems, blast-resistant concrete, and duplicated power and cooling, changes driven by drone and missile strikes that damaged two AWS data centres in the UAE and a third facility in Bahrain in March, followed by an April video from Iran's armed forces explicitly naming the Stargate site, near Al Dhafra Air Base, as a potential military target.

Stargate UAE sits at the centre of the country's ambition to become a global AI hub as it diversifies away from oil. The project is led by G42, the Abu Dhabi AI company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, in partnership with Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco and SoftBank, and was announced during a US presidential visit to the UAE last year. The first phase, a $30 billion, one-gigawatt compute cluster, began construction last year, with the first 200 megawatts expected online this year, en route to a planned five-gigawatt full build-out that Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman and CTO, has said would have enough capacity to connect every UAE government agency and commercial institution to the world's most advanced AI models.

Neither G42 nor OpenAI disputed the substance of Reuters' reporting. G42 said the project's specifics are "subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale," language that confirms an active reassessment without detailing its scope. OpenAI said it continues making "good progress on the infrastructure and adoption priorities needed to deliver it." Reuters could not determine how close Emirati authorities are to finalising the new masterplan, or the extent to which the changes will affect cost and timeline, and four of the six sources specifically confirmed the shift toward distributed, hardened architecture.

This is not the first sign that the region's AI infrastructure buildout has had to account for the conflict rather than pause for it. When the US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership Working Group held its first meeting in April, this site noted the timing coincided directly with reports that military strikes involving Iran had already disrupted UAE and Bahrain data centre infrastructure, and read the meeting's public disclosure as a deliberate signal of continuity rather than retreat. The Stargate redesign is the concrete follow-through on that signal: rather than relocating the project or slowing its timeline, the UAE appears to be absorbing the cost of hardening a live construction project against an active physical threat.

The redesign also reframes how enterprises and investors should read G42's broader strategic moves this year. The company's reported exploration of a majority US ownership stake, and its parallel efforts to expand data centre capacity abroad, including in Minneapolis, now look less like pure market expansion and more like a deliberate diversification of both ownership structure and physical footprint against the same category of geopolitical and physical risk driving the Stargate redesign itself. G42's broader ambition to deploy over a billion AI agents across UAE industries depends entirely on the underlying compute infrastructure surviving exactly the kind of disruption this redesign is meant to withstand, making Stargate's physical resilience a prerequisite for, not a side issue to, the UAE's wider AI strategy.

For enterprises and investors tracking Gulf AI infrastructure specifically, the practical signal is that a $30 billion flagship project being restructured mid-build, rather than paused, cancelled or relocated, indicates the UAE's AI ambitions are proceeding on the explicit assumption that active conflict is now a standing design constraint, not a temporary disruption to wait out. Whether that assumption holds, and whether the added cost and construction time of a hardened, distributed campus changes the economics enough to affect the project's five-gigawatt end goal, will become clearer as Emirati authorities finalise the new masterplan.