1. Stargate UAE Data Centre Clears First Construction Milestone
G42, OpenAI and Oracle confirmed this week that Stargate UAE, their $30 billion Abu Dhabi AI campus, has moved into active construction after breaking ground on its first buildings. The joint venture is designed to deliver a 1 gigawatt compute cluster, with an initial 200 megawatt cell targeted to go live this year. Partners Cisco, Nvidia and SoftBank sit alongside G42 on the project. Executives said regional security events have not pushed the programme off its 2026 schedule.
Why it matters: This is the largest AI infrastructure build outside the United States and anchors the US-UAE chip pact approved in November 2025, which cleared G42 to import the equivalent of 35,000 Nvidia GB300 accelerators. OpenAI's first sovereign-partner data centre now sits on UAE soil, handing Abu Dhabi a direct supply channel to frontier model compute and a regulatory test bed for the UAE AI Charter.
Read more: G42
2. Raedbots Launches as Egypt's First Domestic Industrial Robotics Maker
Cairo-based Raedbots went public on 12 April as the first Egyptian manufacturer building AI-driven industrial robots end to end, from mechanical design to control software. Founded by CTO Mohamed Ibrahim and COO Hamza El-Sahiti, the company produces robotic arms for welding, material handling and warehouse automation. Raedbots uses Nvidia's Isaac simulation and AI stack for training, and says its vertically integrated approach undercuts imported rivals by up to 50 per cent. The startup sits inside Egypt's Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center programme under MCIT.
Why it matters: Industrial robot imports into Egypt cost factories hard currency they no longer have after three rounds of Egyptian pound devaluation. A domestic supplier that licenses Nvidia Isaac but builds locally gives Egyptian MCIT a concrete exhibit for its Digital Egypt 2030 plan, and it pulls hardware AI talent back from Gulf salaries into Cairo labs.
Read more: Wamda
3. NAVER Cloud-Backed Consortium Signs $1.28 Billion Morocco AI Factory Deal
At GITEX Africa in Marrakech on 9 April, Nexus Core Systems signed a MAD 12 billion memorandum of understanding with Morocco's Ministry of Digital Transition to build the Nexus AI Factory Platform. Phase one commits MAD 5 billion to a 16 megawatt HPC data centre in Nouaceur, with a second 20 megawatt northern site bringing total capacity to 36 megawatts and 125 direct jobs by end of 2027. The project is backed by South Korea's NAVER Cloud and Dubai's Lloyds Capital, and will run on renewable energy. Morocco separately launched an EU Digital Dialogue during the same event, tying four European supercomputing centres to Mohammed VI University.
Why it matters: A Korean hyperscaler routing sovereign AI compute through Rabat rather than Riyadh or Abu Dhabi breaks the Gulf-only assumption about where MENA AI capacity gets built. For Morocco, 36 megawatts is small next to Stargate UAE but it arrives with NAVER's HyperCLOVA X Arabic and French training pipelines, giving Casablanca a seat at the North African AI sovereignty table alongside its new EU research tie-in.
Read more: Ecofin Agency
THE AI IN ARABIA VIEW
The UAE continues to punch above its weight in the global AI arena, leveraging its position as a business hub and its willingness to move fast on regulation and deployment. The tension between openness to international partnerships and the push for sovereign capability will define its next chapter in the AI race.