Abu Dhabi is building a gigawatt of compute at Masdar City

Stargate UAE is a one-gigawatt compute cluster being built inside a planned five-gigawatt UAE–US AI Campus at Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. It is being constructed by Khazna Data Centers, a G42 company, alongside OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank. The first 200-megawatt phase is expected to come online during 2026. The numbers are worth holding still for a moment, because gigawatt is a unit that gets used loosely in AI announcements and is being used precisely here. A large conventional data centre draws tens of megawatts. A hyperscale campus might reach a few hundred. A gigawatt is the output of a substantial power station, dedicated to a single computing site. That is why the phasing matters more than the headline. The 200MW first phase is the part with a date attached. The remaining 800MW of the cluster, and the further four gigawatts of the wider campus, are a build programme rather than a commissioning schedule — and build programmes of that scale are governed by grid connection, transformer supply and cooling capacity rather than by chip availability. Power, not silicon, is the constraint that decides whether announced AI capacity arrives. The partner list is the most informative part of the project. OpenAI supplies the workload rationale. Nvidia supplies the accelerators. Oracle and Cisco supply infrastructure layers. SoftBank supplies capital and its own Stargate relationship. Khazna builds and operates. What that assembles is a full stack in one location, with an anchor tenant whose demand is not speculative. Most sovereign AI announcements in the region name a capacity figure and a partner; this one names a workload owner. Stargate UAE is one component of a much larger allocation. MGX , the investment platform launched by Mubadala and G42, is working toward $100bn committed to AI infrastructure and applications. Abu Dhabi's population of AI firms grew 67% during 2025 to reach 700 companies. G42 itself — chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan and backed by Mubadala — has been reported to be courting investors for a multibillion-dollar raise as it expands cloud, data centre and AI projects. The strategic logic has been stated openly: the UAE is working to make itself a place where frontier AI is computed rather than only consumed. Compute is the scarcest input in that industry, it is physically located somewhere, and Abu Dhabi has capital and land and is prepared to build power. The open question is where the demand comes from. A gigawatt of compute at Masdar City serves the UAE most directly if UAE companies and institutions are the ones using it, and serves a different function if the tenants are largely foreign AI labs. Both are legitimate businesses and they produce different economies. The first builds a domestic capability; the second builds an export industry in power, cooling and operations, which is a substantial business in its own right and one several countries would like to have. The composition of tenants across the first 200MW will indicate which mix is emerging, well before the remaining four-point-eight gigawatts are committed.