The Gulf's Biggest AI Infrastructure Projects in 2026

The Gulf's AI competition is rapidly becoming an infrastructure competition. The region's most important AI announcements are no longer limited to models, government strategies or venture funds. They now involve multi-gigawatt campuses, specialised accelerator clusters and cloud regions designed to host frontier-scale compute.

The projects below are not directly comparable. Some figures describe an entire campus, others a first phase, and some investment announcements include cloud services and training alongside physical infrastructure. Gulf Business Review therefore keeps power capacity, investment value and project stage separate.

Stargate UAE anchors the Abu Dhabi buildout

G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank and Cisco announced Stargate UAE in May 2025. The cluster is planned inside a newly established 5 GW UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi, giving the UAE one of the largest announced AI infrastructure platforms globally.

The 5 GW figure describes the broader campus rather than the initial Stargate deployment itself. That distinction matters because multi-gigawatt campuses are typically built in phases and the headline capacity should not be read as operating compute available today.

Oxagon has moved from concept into construction

DataVolt's Oxagon AI factory was originally announced as a planned 1.5 GW campus with an initial $5 billion first-phase investment. On 31 August 2026, HUMAIN and DataVolt said construction was underway on the first phase, which totals 360 MW, with 100 MW currently being jointly developed and targeted for availability in 2028.

That progression makes Oxagon particularly useful to track because it provides a visible sequence from long-term campus ambition to a defined first phase and then to capacity under development. It is a better measure of execution than the original 1.5 GW headline alone.

AWS and HUMAIN add a separate Saudi platform

AWS and HUMAIN announced more than $5 billion of joint AI investment in 2025, on top of AWS's separate $5.3 billion Saudi cloud-region investment. In September 2026, AWS said its first Saudi cloud region remained on track for December 2026 and that the partners planned up to 50 MW of AI Zone capacity by 2028.

These commitments should not be merged with DataVolt's Oxagon figures. They are separate infrastructure and partnership programmes, even though HUMAIN participates across multiple parts of Saudi Arabia's AI buildout.

Our view: execution will separate the winners

The Gulf now has no shortage of enormous AI infrastructure announcements. The differentiator from here will be energised capacity, accelerator deployment, utilisation and customers. A 5 GW campus plan is strategically important, but the market will eventually judge how much capacity becomes operational and how quickly.

Gulf Business Review will therefore maintain this as a recurring infrastructure franchise, updating capacity by project stage rather than treating every announced gigawatt as equivalent. That should make the dataset more useful as projects move from agreements to construction and then into live service.