Machinepower Index / Dossiers / United Arab Emirates
Rank 10–15 across the scoring rules tested. How this is tested
United Arab Emirates
Sovereign Capital — For nations with more money than research depth: buy the frontier rather than build it, acquiring chips, talent, data centres and equity stakes at scale while the window is open.
How the Score, Potential and bottleneck cost are worked out: methodology.
The three layers
Energy, grids, data centres and silicon — the physical capacity to run models at scale.
Compute tracked by Epoch AI: the United Arab Emirates controls 74,000 H100-equivalents, wherever the sites are. Hosted compute is shown, not scored.
Models, alignment capability, standards influence and the talent that produces them.
The capacity to wire AI into the state and the economy while holding public consent.
Where the score comes from
| Layer | Sub-dimension | Basis | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Watts | Planning & Permitting | Assessed | 9.4 |
| Firm Power Capacity | Dataset | 5.0 | |
| Sovereign Compute | Dataset | 5.6 | |
| Hardware & Silicon Access | Dataset | 4.0 | |
| Weights | Frontier Model Output | Assessed | 4.6 |
| Alignment Capability | Assessed | 6.6 | |
| Regulatory Standing | Dataset | 7.2 | |
| Talent Density | Dataset | 4.4 | |
| Will | Policy Capacity | Dataset | 7.3 |
| Public Sector Adoption | Dataset | 9.7 | |
| Workforce Transition | Dataset | 7.5 | |
| Public Trust | Assessed | 8.8 |
Assessed marks a measurement we judged rather than took from a dataset: 4 of the 12 here.
Sources
Epoch AI records about 74,000 H100-equivalents owned by Emirati firms (Core42 and G42), including Core42's cluster in the United States. Because that exceeds what TOP500 shows, the Index raises Sovereign Compute to the level Epoch supports.
View source →Stargate UAE (G42 with OpenAI, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco, SoftBank), announced by OpenAI on 22 May 2025, targets its first 200 MW in 2026 within a planned 5 GW UAE-US AI campus; first NVIDIA exports were approved October 2025.
View source →The US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership (signed May 2025) held its first interagency working-group meeting in April 2026, operationalising the audited chip-export corridor.
View source →Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute maintains the Falcon open-weight series, keeping a sovereign model capability alongside imported frontier access.
View source →Used for the workforce measurement. The IMF combines schooling, pay, labour mobility and active labour-market policies; the Index rescales it so the weakest of 173 economies scores 0 and the strongest 10.
View source →Fossil, nuclear, hydro and other dispatchable plant; averaged with generation for firm power.
View source →Second source for talent, averaged with Stanford's count.
View source →Bottlenecks
These hold the United Arab Emirates below its Potential. Its two lowest scores cost it the most: hardware & silicon access at 4.0 (part of Watts) and talent density at 4.4 (part of Weights).
Assessment
The UAE is rapidly positioning itself as a regional hub for intelligence capital. Backed by sovereign wealth, and agreements like G42 and Falcon series, its main hurdle is reliance on US hardware export permits and grid scale limitations in non-desert corridors.
The art of the possible
The UAE is one energy-to-intelligence conversion away from Tier 1 relevance: Stargate-scale compute plus aggressive research recruitment could turn Falcon's open-weight foundation into genuine frontier capability inside a decade.
Strategic play — Sovereign Capital
Turn the landlord's seat into an owner's: recruit the research talent that Falcon and Stargate-scale compute still lack, because a position bought with capital and cheap energy can be revoked by a single export licence, and only frontier capability of its own makes that harder.
Leverage — the nearest position. Capital and cheap energy bought a seat at the table: Stargate UAE makes it the first place allied frontier compute lands outside the alliance system. Leverage as landlord — real, but revocable by an export licence.
Open United Arab Emirates in the live Index → — every source behind every number, and the comparison tool.