Two UAE companies are betting that AI adoption in the region hinges less on ambition and more on plumbing, specifically, who controls the compute, the connectivity, and the data behind it.
Core42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI infrastructure provider, announced a new partnership this week with e&, the telecom company formerly known as Etisalat that now serves roughly 248 million customers across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The deal pairs Core42’s Sovereign AI Cloud platform with e&’s existing digital infrastructure, aimed at speeding up how e& builds and rolls out AI products for its own customer base.
For e&’s UAE customers specifically, the partnership also opens up a sovereign data option, meaning organizations in government, retail, and manufacturing sectors get faster, more affordable access to Core42’s AI accelerators while keeping their data under local jurisdiction. e& is pairing that access with a new service called GPU Connect, designed to make it simpler for customers to actually plug into AI infrastructure without needing deep technical expertise in-house.
Jaafar Al Hashmi, Core42’s vice-president of government and market development, framed the deal as extending sovereign AI beyond just infrastructure into something organizations can actually deploy and run in production, rather than something that stays stuck in pilot mode. Esam Mahmoud, e&’s SVP of SMB sales and marketing, tied the partnership directly to the UAE’s broader push toward an AI-native economy, particularly the government’s agentic AI agenda, which focuses on deploying systems capable of analyzing and acting with minimal human intervention.
This isn’t Core42‘s first major infrastructure move this year. The company expanded its AI cluster capacity at a TeraWulf-operated data center in Buffalo, New York, from 42 megawatts to 60 megawatts back in June, and in May it secured a $550 million loan from HSBC specifically earmarked for expanding its footprint across the US and Europe. Taken together, the pattern suggests Core42 is scaling well beyond its home base in Abu Dhabi, even as it deepens its role as the backbone for AI infrastructure inside the UAE itself.
Whether this partnership actually accelerates AI adoption among UAE enterprises and government entities the way both companies expect will likely depend on how quickly organizations move from testing these tools to running them at real operational scale.
