When the presidents of the United Arab Emirates and the United States unveiled a 5 GW AI campus in Abu Dhabi on 15 May 2025, the pitch was simple: abundant power, deep capital and a location within 3,200 km of nearly half the world's population. Sixteen months later, the war that closed the Strait of Hormuz has added a requirement nobody had priced in. The campus has to survive missile and drone attacks.
On 11 September 2026, Reuters reported that the UAE was revising its plan. Originally envisaged as a 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi, the project will now likely comprise a network of data centres spread across the UAE, according to four sources. Authorities are considering air defences, building some facilities underground and placing those that host the most sensitive data inside mountains.
What was planned
The campus was announced as a G42-led project with American partners, and the US Department of Commerce statement at the time said it would use nuclear, solar and gas power to keep carbon emissions low. Within it sits Stargate UAE, a 1 GW cluster launched on 22 May 2025 as the first deployment under OpenAI's OpenAI for Countries programme, with partners G42, Oracle, NVIDIA, Cisco and SoftBank. OpenAI said the first 200 MW was expected to go live in 2026.
In October 2025, G42 said construction of the first 200 MW was "well underway and progressing steadily toward the planned 2026 delivery," with Khazna, G42's data centre company, building the facility. G42's chief executive later cited more than 7,000 workers and over 100 cranes on site. Reuters put the cost of the 1 GW cluster at $30 billion.
What changed
Emirati officials began reviewing their AI infrastructure plans soon after Iran started firing missiles and drones at Gulf neighbours that host American forces, according to the Reuters sources. Two Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE were damaged in the attacks in March, along with one in Bahrain, and AWS services in the region were still disrupted at the time of the report. In April, Iran's armed forces issued a video naming Stargate UAE as a potential target, with a map purporting to show the construction site.
The first phase is expected to continue largely as planned, with modifications to protect it from aerial attack, according to an industry executive and another person briefed on the matter. The rest of the project will likely be spread across multiple locations. Planned measures include drone and missile interceptors, electronic jamming equipment, blast-resistant concrete and additional backup power and cooling systems.
G42 told Reuters that work on the campus was progressing as planned. OpenAI said it was making "good progress on the infrastructure and adoption priorities needed to deliver it." Reuters said it could not determine the effect of the changes on cost or timing.
The power question
Distributing a 5 GW programme across the country changes the energy problem as much as the security problem. A single campus can be served by dedicated high-voltage lines and a planned mix of generation. A network of hardened sites needs grid connections in multiple places, each with its own redundancy, and in some cases its own on-site generation.
The UAE's power system has strengths. Its Barakah nuclear plant and large solar parks were part of the campus pitch. But gas remains central to the Emirati grid, and the war has exposed the region's gas networks. The International Energy Agency (IEA) says about 96 per cent of the UAE's LNG exports transited the Strait of Hormuz in 2025, and that the war cut LNG exports from Qatar and the UAE by over 300 million cubic metres a day from 1 March. Qatar also supplies pipeline gas within the region through the Dolphin pipeline, almost 20.5 billion cubic metres in 2025, according to the IEA, but that pipeline has limited spare capacity.
The IEA expects gas demand in the Middle East to contract by around 4 per cent in 2026, the region's first annual decline since 1993, because gas production and processing facilities have been damaged and gas-intensive industries have cut output. For a data centre programme that was meant to run partly on gas, damage to regional gas infrastructure is a supply risk in its own right.
Backup power adds a further consideration. Hardened facilities designed to keep running during an attack need generation that does not depend on the grid, which in practice means diesel or gas engines with fuel stored on site, and potentially batteries. That raises costs and, depending on the fuel, emissions.
The commercial logic under strain
The UAE's AI strategy rests on a bargain. In return for access to NVIDIA chips and other advanced US technology, the UAE agreed to cut AI ties with China and invest in the Stargate initiative's US data centres, Reuters noted. The campus was meant to give US hyperscalers a regional platform for serving Asia, Africa and Europe.
Customers choosing where to place AI workloads weigh power cost, latency and risk. The Gulf offered cheap power and fast construction. A campus that needs air defences and underground halls is a more expensive proposition, and one whose risk profile may matter more to some customers than the savings on power. Mubadala's chairman had said the first 200 MW would be ready in the third quarter of 2026, but as of mid-September no operating capacity, energisation date or customer availability had been published, according to a tracker of the project maintained by The Gulf Tape.
What to watch
The first marker is whether the 200 MW first phase is energised before the end of 2026, as G42 and OpenAI have said. The second is how the distributed design is powered: whether new sites connect to the existing grid, rely on Barakah and solar, or bring their own gas or diesel generation. The third is whether hyperscalers that were expected to take capacity in the campus keep their commitments.
The Gulf's case for becoming an AI hub was built on energy. The war has shown that energy alone is not enough when the energy infrastructure is itself a target.