The United Arab Emirates is quietly redesigning a 5-gigawatt artificial intelligence data centre project — one of the largest outside the United States — after the war with Iran forced a rethink of how and where critical infrastructure is built, Hiru News reported, carrying a Reuters investigation sourced to six people familiar with the deliberations.

Originally conceived as a single 10-square-mile (26 sq km) campus in Abu Dhabi, the project will now most likely become a network of data centres spread across the UAE, four of the sources said. Authorities are also weighing how to defend the facilities against drone and missile attack — including with air defences and by building some of them underground.

Reuters reports the design changes have not previously been made public. Its sources included a US official, a Western diplomat and industry executives briefed on the discussions, all speaking on condition of anonymity.

Why the plan changed

Emirati officials began reviewing their AI infrastructure soon after Iran started firing missiles and drones at Gulf states hosting American forces, in retaliation for US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran.

Two Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE were damaged in those attacks in March, along with one in Bahrain. AWS cloud services in the region remain disrupted, according to the company’s own status updates.

In April, Iran’s armed forces released a video naming Stargate UAE as a potential target. It carried a map purporting to show where the complex is being built, captioned: “Nothing stays hidden from our sight.” Two people familiar with the matter confirmed to Reuters that the site — near Al Dhafra Air Base, which hosts US forces — was not publicly known before the video appeared.

What is being built

The UAE–US AI Campus was announced during President Donald Trump’s visit to the Gulf state last year. It is central to the UAE’s ambition to become an AI power as it moves its economy away from oil, and is led by G42, the AI firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of its president.

In exchange for access to Nvidia AI chips and other advanced American technology, the UAE agreed to cut its AI ties with China and invest in Stargate’s data centres in the United States. Stargate is the joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.

The first phase — a $30 billion, 1-gigawatt compute cluster known as Stargate UAE — began construction last year, with an initial 200 megawatts due to come online this year. Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has said the finished project will have enough capacity to connect every UAE government agency and commercial institution to the most advanced AI models available.

G42 told Reuters work was progressing as planned, adding that “the project’s specifics are subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale,” without elaborating. OpenAI said it was making “good progress on the infrastructure and adoption priorities” needed to deliver the UAE’s AI vision. The Emirati advanced technology ministry, Nvidia, Oracle and Cisco did not respond to Reuters; SoftBank declined to comment.

Not reported

Reuters could not determine how close Emirati authorities are to finalising a new masterplan, or how far the changes would affect construction costs and timelines. The report does not say how many sites the dispersed network would run to, where they would be, whether the Al Dhafra site is still in use, or what the first 200 megawatts now costs to defend. It gives no timetable for the air-defence or underground options, and no US government position on whether the chip export terms change if the campus design does.

This account rests on a single newsroom’s relay of the Reuters report; no other verified outlet available at the time of writing had carried it.