Microsoft Commits Over US$15 Billion to UAE and Secures US Export Licenses for Advanced AI Chips

Microsoft has pledged an investment of more than US$15 billion in the United Arab Emirates through the end of 2029, the company’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith announced. The bulk of these funds will be directed toward expanding artificial-intelligence (AI) data centres across the UAE.

At the same time, Microsoft revealed it has secured US government export licences — under the previous U.S. administration — to ship advanced chips from NVIDIA to the UAE. The licences include shipments of A100, H100, H200 and the newer GB300 GPU families.

Smith explained that approximately US$7.3 billion of the investment has already been or will be spent by the end of this year, with another US$7.9 billion earmarked for 2026-29. Of that latter amount, more than US$5.5 billion will go directly to capital expenses for AI and cloud infrastructure in the UAE.

The licences, according to Microsoft’s blog post, permit accrual of the equivalent of 21,500 A100-class GPUs (via combinations of A100, H100, H200) and, in one tranche, the equivalent of 60,400 A100-class chips involving GB300 GPUs. These shipments have not yet occurred but are slated to arrive in “a matter of months”.

Analysis / Impact:
This move underscores a salient shift in the global AI infrastructure landscape. For Microsoft, the dual strategy of large-scale investment plus chip access in the UAE signals commitment not just to cloud services, but to embedding itself in the Middle East’s evolving AI ecosystem. The UAE, for its part, is positioning itself as a regional AI hub — and by attracting Microsoft, it seeks to move beyond raw resource exports toward high-value digital infrastructure.

Securing US export licences for advanced NVIDIA chips is particularly noteworthy. These chips are central to modern large-language-models and high-performance AI workloads. That the US government has green-lit their partial export to a Gulf nation marks an important milestone in tech-geopolitics. It reflects how AI hardware is now a strategic asset and how alliances are being shaped around compute-capacity as much as natural resources.

However, this also raises complex questions: Can Microsoft and the UAE deploy and operate this scale of infrastructure effectively and responsibly? Deploying high-end chips and data centres at this scale involves not just hardware, but talent, security, regulatory frameworks and energy-infrastructure considerations. Moreover, with compute capacity comes power consumption, heat, cooling, and oversight issues — particularly when shipments are coming under export-control regimes.

In broader terms, this pact may accelerate regional competition. Other nations in the Gulf and beyond will observe how the UAE leverages this investment to build a meaningful AI ecosystem. If successful, the UAE could become a springboard for AI innovation in Africa, South Asia and the Global South; if not, it may become an expensive infrastructure bet with