In less than a decade, the United Arab Emirates have undergone a strategic transformation that few states have dared to pursue with such political clarity and financial intensity. Artificial intelligence is no longer treated as a promising sector among others, but as the central architecture of the country’s post-oil national project. The underlying conviction is straightforward yet radical: future sovereignty will be measured less by natural resources and more by computing power, data, talent and the ability to convert AI into geopolitical leverage.
The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031 sets extraordinarily ambitious economic targets. Emirati authorities estimate that AI could generate up to AED 353 billion in value by 2030, representing around 13 to 14 percent of GDP. Other official projections, particularly from Dubai, go even further, suggesting that AI could account for as much as 40 percent of GDP by 2031. These figures reflect a clear political message: AI is meant to become the backbone of the Emirati economy, permeating administration, energy, finance, industry and culture.
Dubai has positioned itself as the global showcase of this ambition. In 2024, the city launched the “One Million AI Prompters” initiative, an unprecedented program aimed at training one million people in AI and prompt engineering within three years. Overseen by the Dubai Future Foundation, the program embodies a distinctive approach: democratizing AI beyond engineers and data scientists, and making generative AI literacy a core skill of the future workforce. As articulated by Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai seeks to become the most future-ready city in the world, capable of anticipating and shaping global technological change.
This focus on human capital is reinforced by deliberate global visibility. The world’s first global prompt engineering championship, hosted in Dubai, attracted thousands of applicants from more than one hundred countries. By recognizing disciplines ranging from coding to art and literature, the event conveyed a broad vision of AI as a tool for creativity, productivity and cultural transformation. With prizes totaling one million dirhams, the Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence sent a powerful signal: AI is also an instrument of soft power and international attraction.
On the industrial front, the Emirati ecosystem has been built around national champions operating at global scale. The Abu Dhabi-based technology group G42 has become a cornerstone of this architecture, combining cloud services, high-performance computing and applied AI. Its strategic partnership with Microsoft marked a decisive shift. The initial 1.5 billion dollar investment announced in 2024, followed by a broader plan bringing total commitments to over 15 billion dollars, has positioned the UAE among the world’s leading AI and computing hubs. These investments span hyperscale data centers, access to advanced GPUs and the development of AI solutions designed for global export.
This expansion is supported by a clear push for research and technological sovereignty. The Technology Innovation Institute gained worldwide recognition with the Falcon family of large language models, notably Falcon 180B, one of the largest open models released globally. This achievement signaled the ability of a non-Western state to contribute meaningfully to frontier AI development. A strong emphasis on Arabic-language models further transforms a long-standing weakness into a strategic advantage, positioning the UAE as a leader in AI adapted to regional linguistic and cultural contexts.
Talent development is reinforced by a unique academic institution, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. As the world’s first university fully dedicated to AI, it attracts students and researchers from across the globe and operates as a direct talent pipeline for the national ecosystem. In parallel, the sovereign wealth fund Mubadala has announced the creation of an AI-focused fund potentially reaching 100 billion dollars, underscoring the commitment to long-term, capital-intensive innovation.
Domestically, the state functions as a full-scale testing ground. Public administrations increasingly integrate AI into everyday operations, and Dubai’s paperless government policy has eliminated hundreds of millions of paper documents while delivering measurable productivity gains. In the energy sector, ADNOC is deploying advanced AI systems for predictive maintenance, production optimization and strategic planning, demonstrating that AI is also a transition tool for hydrocarbon-based economies.
Finally, the international dimension of the Emirati AI strategy is explicit. The UAE are now actively courted as a strategic partner by global technology giants such as Microsoft, Google and IBM. Through projects across Africa and other regions of the Global South, they export digital infrastructure, cloud services and AI solutions, transforming technological leadership into economic diplomacy.
Overall, the UAE’s AI trajectory is neither symbolic nor incremental. It represents a comprehensive reconfiguration of power, in which artificial intelligence becomes an economic engine, a sovereignty instrument, a diplomatic asset and a universal language of the future.
