Every major transformation in human history had a backbone. The steam era had railways. The industrial era had electricity. The digital era had the internet. The AI era will run on the intelligence grid. Core42 is building that grid from the UAE to the world. Artificial intelligence is moving from experiment to infrastructure. Intelligence is now manufactured at scale, like steel or oil was manufactured years ago. The UAE has chosen to be a net producer while advancing to deliver equitable access to intelligence globally.
In 2024, that choice turned into hardware, concrete, and code with the UAE-US AI Campus and Stargate UAE. These initiatives by the UAE and US give the country the scarcest commodity in AI today: access to trusted, high-performance compute at a national scale. G42 is the national AI champion behind this agenda, and Core42 is the digital infrastructure engine within that ecosystem. Our role is clear: to design, build, and operate the digital backbone that turns power and silicon into tokens that support national priorities, regional demand, and responsible global deployment.
In 2025, Core42 advanced that mandate on several fronts. We strengthened the Core42 AI Cloud into a sovereign platform built for national-scale workloads. Enterprises and developers across the UAE can now access advanced computing through self-service, pay-as-you-go models in minutes rather than months. We also made OpenAI’s latest open weight models available globally through the Core42 AI Cloud and Compass API platform.
Our heterogeneous AI infrastructure strategy and deployments globally were validated in the toughest possible arenas. Core42’s AMD Instinct MI300X cluster in New York entered the TOP500 rankings in the top 20 worldwide and placed third on the IO500 SC25 list. Two of our supercomputers in Abu Dhabi now rank among the top in the region. These results show that world-class AI capability does not have to sit in a single geography or a vendor’s cloud. It can be designed and operated from Abu Dhabi to serve the world.
The partnership with Microsoft also moved to a new tier. Building on a strategic investment in G42 in 2024, Microsoft announced a $15.2bn commitment to the UAE by 2029, anchoring cloud, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and talent development in the country. Together, we launched the Responsible AI Future Foundation, focused on practical standards, safety, and capacity building for the Middle East and the Global South. Core42 also expanded its international footprint by deploying large-scale AI infrastructure and platforms with partners such as Alef Education and iGenius across Europe and beyond. These projects show that the UAE can operate as trusted nodes in the emerging intelligence grid.
Several trends shape our outlook for the year ahead. The AI bottleneck is shifting from ideas to infrastructure. Model innovation is advancing rapidly, but without energy, AI accelerators, and trusted sovereign cloud architectures, those models will not scale. Governments are moving from slogans to implementation, seeking global models while retaining control over sensitive data and regulation. As a result, AI-native societies are beginning to emerge across sectors dependent on a stable intelligence grid beneath everything.
In 2026, Core42 will scale capacity across the UAE and expand the intelligence grid that G42 operates globally, extend our sovereign cloud platforms and Digital Embassy programme so that governments and enterprises across the UAE and partner countries can unlock proprietary data, deploy advanced models, and meet regulatory obligations without friction. We will continue to turn global partnerships into real capability through expanded alliances and talent pipelines.
Core42’s mandate is to provide the digital backbone that makes the UAE’s ambition durable. We are building systems that will allow the UAE to export intelligence, not just consume it.
