UAE Decentralizes Stargate AI Project After Iranian Missile Threats
The United Arab Emirates is redesigning its 5-gigawatt Stargate AI data center into a distributed network to protect against Iranian drone and missile attacks.
The Government of the United Arab Emirates is revising plans for Stargate UAE, a 5-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center project, to protect the infrastructure from Iranian aerial attacks. Originally envisioned as a single 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi near Al Dhafra Air Base, the project will now likely be decentralized into a network of smaller sites across the country to prevent a single catastrophic strike from disabling the system.
This redesign follows missile and drone attacks in March that damaged data centers in the UAE, as well as an April video from the Iranian armed forces that explicitly named the $30 billion first-phase compute cluster as a target. To harden the facilities, authorities are considering military-grade measures, including blast-resistant concrete, electronic jamming equipment, and air defense systems. Sensitive military data centers may be placed underground or inside mountains in the Ras Al Khaimah and Fujairah emirates.
The project is led by G42 in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, and SoftBank. While the first phase will proceed with these modifications, the shift reflects a broader effort to make the nation's critical AI infrastructure war-proof.
