Stargate: huge Abu Dhabi plans

The eye-popping number in this story is not the campus size. It is that “Stargate” started in January 2025 as a plan to spend up to $500 billion building artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States, and is now also being used on a separate Abu Dhabi buildout with some of the same partners. (openai.com) OpenAI said on May 22, 2025 that “Stargate UAE” will include a 1 gigawatt cluster in Abu Dhabi, with 200 megawatts expected to go live in 2026. A gigawatt is power-plant scale: enough electrical capacity that the site is being framed as national infrastructure, not a normal corporate data center. (openai.com) G42, the Abu Dhabi technology group at the center of the project, said that 1 gigawatt cluster will sit inside a newly established 5 gigawatt “United Arab Emirates–United States artificial intelligence campus” in Abu Dhabi. Bloomberg separately reported that the full campus is planned at 5 gigawatts, which would make it one of the largest artificial intelligence data center sites ever proposed. (g42.ai) (bloomberg.com) The “seven times Central Park” line comes from converting land area, not computing power. Central Park is about 843 acres, so seven times that is roughly 5,900 acres, or a little over 9 square miles, which is why the claim sounds cinematic even before anyone talks about chips or servers. (centralparknyc.org) (calculator.net) The companies attached to the Abu Dhabi announcement were G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank. That matters because it overlaps heavily with the January 2025 Stargate lineup in the United States, where OpenAI said SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX were the initial equity funders and Arm was a technology partner. (g42.ai) (openai.com) MGX is the Abu Dhabi investment vehicle that links the Gulf money story to the original United States one. OpenAI named MGX as an initial equity funder for the January 2025 Stargate Project, and Bloomberg reported in February 2026 that MGX was aiming to deploy up to $10 billion a year into artificial intelligence deals tied to groups including OpenAI and Anthropic. (openai.com) (bloomberg.com) That is why the argument online is really about three different things being blended together: a $500 billion United States infrastructure promise, a 1 gigawatt Abu Dhabi cluster, and a 5 gigawatt Abu Dhabi campus. If you compress those into one sentence, it can sound like a single $500 billion Gulf project when the public announcements describe related but distinct structures. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) (g42.ai) There is also a political layer. OpenAI said the United Arab Emirates deal was developed in coordination with the United States government and tied it to a “United States–United Arab Emirates Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Partnership” announced during President Donald Trump’s visit, which turns a server farm into a diplomatic project. (openai.com) The practical question is whether these giant plans become real buildings on real timelines. Semafor reported in October 2025 that construction was underway on the 1 gigawatt Abu Dhabi project and that the first 20 percent of the site was on schedule to open in 2026, while Bloomberg reported in August 2025 that SoftBank had acknowledged the broader Stargate effort needed more time to come together. (semafor.com) (bloomberg.com) So the cleanest way to read the story is this: Abu Dhabi is not a side note to the artificial intelligence buildout anymore. It is being positioned as one of the world’s biggest computing hubs, backed by Gulf capital, United States tech firms, and a branding strategy that deliberately ties local desert land to a global race for chips, power, and influence. (openai.com) (g42.ai)