Middle East
The UAE is pouring concrete for the biggest AI campus outside America
By Staff Writer | 24 July 2026
Abu Dhabi's Stargate UAE is turning the Gulf into one of the world's largest construction sites for artificial intelligence, a build-out measured in gigawatts rather than square metres.
Stargate UAE is a 1-gigawatt computing cluster being built by G42 and operated by OpenAI and Oracle. It sits inside a planned 5-gigawatt UAE and US AI campus in Abu Dhabi, a roughly $30bn undertaking spanning about 10 square miles.
The alliance behind it, which includes G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank and Cisco, broke ground in Abu Dhabi in March 2026.
This initiative is about building a bridge ... that helps bring the benefits of AI to economies, societies, and people around the world.
Peng Xiao, group chief executive, G42
A construction story as much as a tech one
Behind the headline numbers is a vast civil and building programme: foundations and structures at scale, then the power, cooling and water systems that a gigawatt of computing demands. Substations, transmission, chillers and specialist mechanical and electrical work sit at the heart of it.
The wider pipeline is already drawing in contractors. McLaren International, part of McLaren Construction Group, has been appointed main contractor for the next phase of the DX3 data centre in Dubai, one of many facilities in build across the Emirates.
A demanding build
Data centres are among the fastest-growing and most technically demanding workloads in regional construction. They combine heavy civil and structural work with critical mechanical and electrical systems, on programmes that leave little room for delay.
For contractors and their advisers that mix rewards careful planning: power and grid connections, cooling and water, long-lead equipment and phased handovers all have to line up.
The Gulf's bet on artificial intelligence is, in the end, a construction bet. The concrete, steel and megawatts have to be delivered before the compute can run.