Stargate UAE is the first major deal announced by the OpenAI-led Stargate consortium in its march to develop giant data centers for artificial intelligence around the world. The massive Abu Dhabi cluster is expected to go live with 200 megawatts in 2026 then scale up to 1 gigawatt — enough to power a million homes — eventually taking its place as part of a 5GW UAE-U.S. AI technology cluster in the region. Stargate partners G42, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank are participating in the build-out, which OpenAI explains was “developed in close coordination with the U.S. government.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was among the delegation tech elite that accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump on his recent tour of Persian Gulf states — a contingent that also included Elon Musk (not part of Stargate) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The New York Times reports that the Emirati announcement is an indication that the “wildly ambitious” Stargate plan to globally construct hyperscale data centers “may be starting to gain traction” after Altman spent more than a year evangelizing for it.

The AI startup’s Abu Dhabi deal overlaps with the separate agreement reached last week between the United States and the United Arab Emirates to build the 5GW Abu Dhabi campus as part of the broader “UAE/U.S. Framework on Advanced Technology Cooperation” that was announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce May 15. The 5GW cluster — encompassing engineering, AI, data centers and industrial IoT — “would be the largest project of its kind outside the United States,” NYT points out.

Last week’s U.S./UAE deal overturned the Biden-era ban on shipping advanced AI chips to all but “the closest of U.S. allies” and allows the UAE “to import up to 500,000 AI chips a year,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

Reciprocity is a big focus. “G42 is also expected to contribute money to the construction of OpenAI data centers in the United States,” NYT writes, noting that “for every dollar that the firm and its partners invest in the Emirates, they will invest an equivalent amount in the U.S. data centers,” ultimately investing an estimated “tens of billions of dollars in each country.”

Despite those promises “the Middle East data center plans have divided Washington,” reports NYT, noting that while the Trump administration officials who drove the deal are championing it as a way export U.S. technology to the Gulf States and thus gain market share over China, others in the administration are concerned it “poses a threat to national security and risks turning the Middle East into an AI rival of the United States.”

The Gulf States have this month been a nexus of tech dealmaking. Forbes reports that the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh on May 13 drew Google CFO Ruth Porat, talking up “the launch of a new AI center in Saudi Arabia and a partnership with Accenture focused on generative AI,” while “Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed a $5.3 billion investment in Saudi Arabia through Amazon Web Services to build data centers, in addition to $5 billion earmarked for the UAE.”

Starting this week, OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon will kick off an OpenAI for Countries roadshow across the Asia-Pacific region, where Nvidia was also active this month.

Bloomberg says “more than 30 countries have reached out to OpenAI to discuss its effort to help develop AI infrastructure globally” and notes that “the Asia-Pacific is home to more data centers than any other region worldwide” with Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft all lining-up capacity expansions there.