The United Arab Emirates has cemented its status as a global digital powerhouse in 2025, achieving an unprecedented 97% adoption rate of artificial intelligence tools across government entities—the highest worldwide. This remarkable milestone accompanies the nation’s growing tech workforce, which now exceeds 450,000 programmers.
Among the year’s most significant achievements was the launch of the groundbreaking ‘Stargate UAE’ project, a $500 billion supercomputing collaboration involving industry giants G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco, SoftBank, and Nvidia. This initiative will deploy NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, with its initial phase scheduled for 2026 deployment.
The UAE’s AI advancements extended beyond infrastructure to include revolutionary applications across multiple sectors. The nation introduced the world’s first AI-driven legislative analysis system and an AI-powered HR assistant serving over 50,000 government employees while automating 108 public services.
In education, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University reported a transformative 95% reduction in faculty workload through AI implementation, accompanied by substantially improved student outcomes. The cybersecurity domain saw equal innovation with the establishment of a Cybersecurity Excellence Centre in partnership with Google Cloud, projected to generate more than 20,000 specialized jobs.
Technological breakthroughs included the debut of Jais 2, a sophisticated 70-billion-parameter language model trained on 600 billion Arabic tokens—creating the largest Arabic-first dataset ever developed. The UAE also unveiled K2 Think, an open-source system designed for advanced AI reasoning.
International cooperation formed a crucial component of the UAE’s AI strategy, with the establishment of a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi—the largest supercomputing cluster outside the United States. Additional partnerships with France included a dedicated 1-gigawatt data center and joint ventures in renewable energy and semiconductor research.
Financial commitments reached extraordinary levels, with total AI-related investments surpassing AED 543 billion during 2024-2025. The UAE further demonstrated global leadership by pledging $1 billion to the ‘AI for Development’ initiative at the G20 summit and partnering with the Gates Foundation on a $200 million AI ecosystem for agricultural innovation.
To ensure cultural alignment in technological development, the UAE pioneered the ‘AI in the Ring’ index—the world’s first measurement system evaluating how closely AI models align with national cultural values and principles.