The United Arab Emirates is quietly rewriting plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data-center project — one of the largest outside the United States — after the Iran war forced a rethink of how and where critical AI infrastructure should be built, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
What was pitched as a single roughly 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi is now likely to become a network of data centers spread across the UAE, four of the sources said. Officials are also weighing air defenses, underground or mountain siting for the most sensitive loads, blast-resistant construction, and backup power and cooling, according to Reuters’ reporting. The agency could not establish how close authorities are to a final masterplan or how cost and schedule might shift.
The UAE–US AI Campus, announced during President Donald Trump’s visit last year, is led by G42 and is tied to U.S. chip and cloud partners including Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, and SoftBank’s Stargate joint venture. Construction on the first phase — the $30 billion, 1-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster, with an initial 200 megawatts expected online this year — is expected to continue, though with hardening against aerial attack, two people briefed on the matter said. G42 told Reuters work is progressing as planned and that project specifics remain under continuous security and resilience review; OpenAI said it is making “good progress” with the UAE on infrastructure and adoption.
The rethink followed Iranian missile and drone strikes that damaged Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE and Bahrain in March, and an April Iranian forces video that mapped Stargate UAE as a potential target near Al Dhafra Air Base. This brief covers the September 11 Reuters exclusive on the redesign; it does not adjudicate war-damage claims or final Emirati permitting.