- Microsoft’s spending of $15.2 billion in the UAE is not without significance
- The country’s citizens are among the best generative AI users worldwide
- The move is also about building international trust
Microsoft has pledged to invest $15.2 billion in the UAE between 2023 and 2029 to expand its AI infrastructure and build talent in the region.
The company’s investment goes a step further in helping to build trust in technology collaboration and partnerships between the US and the UAE, where Microsoft has already spent $7.3 billion on equity investments, capital expenditures and other ongoing expenditures between 2023 and 2025.
Microsoft now plans to match that with an additional $7.9 billion invested between now and 2029, a period in which $5.5 billion will be dedicated to the expansion of AI and cloud infrastructure, as well as $2.4 billion set aside for operating costs.
Microsoft plans to continue investing in the UAE
As part of its ongoing investments in the UAE, Microsoft has secured US export licenses for Nvidia GPUs while meeting strict security and compliance conditions.
About 81,900 GPUs are now set to be deployed, the company noted, to be used for models across OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft’s own services.
Microsoft’s investment in the United Arab Emirates does not come out of nowhere – the country ranked highest globally for AI use per per capita, according to Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report.
59.4% of the UAE population uses GenAI, ahead of Singapore (58.6%), the report found, with no other countries passing the 50% mark.
Speaking about its upskilling efforts, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the company is well on its way to meeting and surpassing its goal of educating one million people in the UAE by the end of 2027.
The last pillar of the investment is about strengthening trust. “Given the role of export controls and other trade issues, the flow of advanced GPUs and AI models also requires trust between nations,” Smith noted.
To address this, Microsoft is leading the development of the Intergovernmental Assurance Agreement (IGAA) with the UAE and US governments to ensure security, export control and technology transfer requirements are met.
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