Stargate to land its first offshore datacenters in the United Arab Emirates
Says it will serve half of humanity but testing that claim produced a hilarious ChatGPT fail
Stargate, the Open AI led consortium that aims to build giant AI datacenters, has picked the United Arab Emirates as its first non-US destination.
The outfit yesterday annuonced its intention to create a 1GW Stargate UAE cluster in Abu Dhabi and expects 200MW worth of AI kit will go live in 2026.
Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, and SoftBank are all aboard. OpenAI also stated “we greatly appreciate President Trump for his support in making it possible.”
That’s a reference to the Trump administration’s recent reversal of a Biden-era “AI Diffusion Rule” that limited chip exports to non-US companies.
OpenAI said the new Stargate facility means the Emirates “will become the first country in the world to enable ChatGPT nationwide—giving people across the country the ability to access OpenAI's technology.”
That’s an odd one, given that ChatGPT is accessible from any browser.
Interestingly, OpenAI also pointed out that “Stargate UAE has the potential to provide AI infrastructure and compute capacity within a 2,000-mile [3,200km] radius, reaching up to half the world’s population.”
The Register tried to verify that claim by asking ChatGPT to draw a map showing a 3,200 km radius from Abu Dhabi. Here’s the hilarious result that centers on Greece, not the Emirates.
ChatGPT incorrectly drawing a map depicting a 3,200km radius from Abu Dhabi - Click to enlarge
The Register looks forward to AI-produced results like the above bringing enormous benefits to the UAE.
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Other nations can look forward to similar results, as OpenAI pointed out that this is the first collaboration in its “OpenAI for Countries” program that aims to deploy sovereign AI infrastructure in ten nations.
The UAE project brings to life a prediction Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made at Taiwan’s Computex conference this week, where he said AI infrastructure will likely be deployed to energy-rich nations including the Gulf states. Huang also mentioned Canada and Indonesia as likely targets for AI infrastructure and predicted token exports will become a substantial industry.
Unless, of course, they deliver maps like the above. ®
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