By Eliot Brown

OpenAI said it was partnering with United Arab Emirates firm G42 and others to build a huge artificial-intelligence data center in Abu Dhabi, the ChatGPT maker's first large-scale project outside the U.S.

A Gulf state's AI ambitions

OpenAI and G42 said Thursday the data center would have a capacity of 1 gigawatt, putting it among the most powerful in the world.

The project, called Stargate UAE, is part of a broader push by the U.A.E. to become one of the world's biggest funders of AI companies and infrastructure -- and a hub for AI jobs.

The project is led by G42, an AI firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the U.A.E. national-security adviser and brother of the president. As part of the deal, an enhanced version of ChatGPT would be available for free nationwide, OpenAI said.

The first 200-megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of 2026, while the remainder of the project hasn't been finalized. The buildings' construction will be funded by G42, and the data center will be operated by OpenAI and tech company Oracle, G42 said. Other partners include global tech investor SoftBank, chip maker Nvidia and network-equipment company Cisco.

G42 and OpenAI didn't disclose a cost for the Abu Dhabi project, although similar projects planned in the U.S. run well over $10 billion.

U.S. negotiations

The data-center project is the fruit of months of negotiations between the Gulf petrostate and the Trump administration that culminated in a deal last week to allow the U.A.E. to import up to 500,000 AI chips a year, people familiar with the deal have said.

That accord overturned Biden administration restrictions that limited access to cutting-edge AI chips to only the closest of U.S. allies, given concerns that the technology could fall into the hands of adversaries, particularly China.

To convince the Trump administration it was a reliable partner, the U.A.E. embarked on a multipronged charm offensive. Officials from the country publicly committed to investing more than $1.4 trillion in the U.S., used $2 billion of cryptocurrency from Trump's World Liberty Financial to invest in a crypto company, and hosted the CEOs of the top U.S. tech companies for chats in a royal palace in Abu Dhabi.

As part of the U.S.-U.A.E agreement, the Gulf state "will fund the build-out of AI infrastructure in the U.S. at least as large and powerful as that in the UAE," David Sacks, the Trump administration's AI czar, said earlier this week on social media.

U.A.E. fund MGX is already an investor in Stargate, the planned $100 billion network of U.S. data centers being pushed by OpenAI and SoftBank.

Similar accords with other U.S. tech companies are expected in the future, as U.A.E. leaders seek to find other tenants for their planned 5-gigawatt data-center cluster. The project was revealed last week during Trump's visit to the region, where local leaders showed the U.S. president a large model of the project.

The U.A.E. is betting U.S. tech giants will want servers running near users in Africa and India, slightly shaving off the time it takes to transmit data there.

The deal in the U.A.E. comes amid a busy week for OpenAI. On Wednesday, a developer said it secured $11.6 billion in funding to push ahead with an expansion of a data center planned for OpenAI in Texas. OpenAI also announced it was purchasing former Apple designer Jony Ive's startup for $6.5 billion.

Write to Eliot Brown at Eliot.Brown@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 22, 2025 10:49 ET (14:49 GMT)

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