Openii is ready to help develop a 5 Gigawatt Data Center Campus to Abu Dhabi, positioning the company as a primary anchor tenant in what could become one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world, according to a new Bloomberg report.
According to reports, the structure will extend with surprising 10 square miles and consume a power equivalent to five nuclear reactors, diminishing any existing artificial intelligence infrastructure announced by Openai or with its competitors. (Openai has not yet returned Techcrunch’s commentary request, but to put it in perspective, it is bigger than Monaco.)
The project of the United Arab Emirates, developed in collaboration with G42-a technological conglomerate based in Abu Dhabi-Fa part of the ambitious Stargate project by Openii, a joint venture announced in January that could see Openi, Softbank and Oracle build a massive data center all over the world supplied with powerful IT chips to support the development of AI.
While the first Stargate campus of Open in the United States – already in the development phase in skilled, in Texas, should reach 1.2 Gigawatt, this Middle Eastern counterpart would have more than quadrupling this capacity.
The project is emerging among larger artificial intelligence links between the United States and the United Arab Emirates who have been in progress and have made some legislators nervously.
Openi’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates dates back to a 2023 partnership with G42 aimed at guiding the adoption of the AI in the Middle East. During a speech at the beginning of the same year in Abu Dhabi, the CEO of Openi Sam Altman praised the United Arab Emirates, saying that “Ai Da Da before it was beautiful”.
As with most of the world of AI, these relationships are … complicated. Founded in 2018, G42 is presided over by the sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed al Nahyan, councilor for national security of the United Arab Emirates and younger brother of the country’s sovereign. His embrace by Openai raised concerns at the end of 2023 among the US officials, who feared that G42 could allow the Chinese government to gain access to advanced American technology.
These concerns focused on G42’s “active relationships” with the entities in the black list, including Huawei and Beijing Genomics Institute, as well as links with people connected to China’s intelligence efforts.
Following the pressure of US legislators, the G42 CEO told Bloomberg at the beginning of 2024 that the company was moving its strategy, saying: “All our investments in China that had already been made have already been ceased. For this, of course, we no longer need for any presence in China”.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft – an important shareholder of Openi with its wider interests in the region – announced an investment of $ 1.5 billion in G42 and its president, Brad Smith, joined the G42 board of directors.
