Microsoft unveils $15.2 billion AI investments in UAE

U.S. tech giant Microsoft on Monday announced $15.2 billion in investments in artificial intelligence and cloud computing in the United Arab Emirates.

Microsoft’s vice chairman and president Brad Smith said Microsoft had invested $7.3 billion in the Gulf country since 2023 and would spend $7.9 billion more by the end of 2029.

The deal sent U.S. chip-maker Nvidia shares up 2.6 percent, buoyed by hopes the AI juggernaut could see access for its most advanced chips expand to more markets.

“This is not money raised in the UAE. It’s money we’re spending in the UAE,” Smith wrote in a blog post published during a visit to Abu Dhabi.

Smith said the investments had been encouraged by both the US and UAE governments and had involved a partnership with the country’s G42 sovereign artificial intelligence company.

Roughly two-thirds of the money spent will go on building AI and cloud data centres in the UAE, and a third of it on planned local operating expenses.

In the blog post, Smith boasted that Microsoft was the first company to receive export licences from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to supply GPU chips to the UAE.

In some cases, Washington has restricted international access to some of American industry’s most advanced processors of the type that can run the latest AI models.

The UAE is a close U.S. ally and popular investment destination but Washington is keen to avoid seeing the most advanced chips evade export controls and end up with rivals such as China.

Microsoft hailed the “substantial work we did to meet the strong cybersecurity, national security, and other technology conditions required by these licenses.”

Updated licences granted in September allow the firm to “ship the equivalent of 60,400 additional A100 chips … involving Nvidia’s even more advanced GB300 GPUs.”

“We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers and Microsoft itself,” Smith said.