Oracle has expanded its Abu Dhabi cloud region with the deployment of the Middle East’s first Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Supercluster powered by Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, strengthening the UAE’s focus on sovereign artificial intelligence and advanced digital infrastructure. The expansion is designed to support Abu Dhabi’s ambition to become the world’s first fully AI native government by 2027, while enabling governments and regulated industries to access large scale AI compute within the country. The deployment represents one of the region’s most significant investments in high performance AI infrastructure, allowing training, inference and research workloads to be executed in region under strict data residency and sovereignty requirements.
The OCI Supercluster introduces high density AI compute capacity into Oracle’s Abu Dhabi region, supporting complex and compute intensive workloads across public sector and enterprise environments. Oracle stated that the infrastructure is designed to meet the needs of highly regulated sectors, including healthcare, financial services and aviation, where data control and compliance are critical. Nick Redshaw, senior vice president of cloud infrastructure for the Middle East and Africa at Oracle, said the deployment gives governments and enterprises across the region direct access to advanced AI compute capabilities locally, reducing dependency on external infrastructure while maintaining performance and security expectations.
Oracle launched its Abu Dhabi cloud region in 2019, followed shortly by a second UAE region in Dubai, becoming the first global hyperscaler to operate two cloud regions in the country. The latest expansion builds on Oracle’s multi year presence in the Middle East, where the company has steadily expanded its sovereign and government grade cloud footprint. Oracle currently operates cloud regions in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Jeddah, with plans to expand into Riyadh, alongside dedicated sovereign cloud zones designed specifically for government and defence workloads. With active and planned regions across more than 200 global locations, Oracle positions itself as a hyperscaler delivering consistent full stack cloud services across public, private and edge environments.
Marc Domenech, senior regional director of enterprise Meta at Nvidia, said the collaboration integrates Nvidia accelerated computing with OCI’s secure and distributed cloud platform to deliver large scale compute performance while preserving national data control. The compute capacity enabled by the new supercluster supports the development of large scale foundation models, sector specific AI assistants and compute intensive scientific workloads, all while keeping data within the UAE. The UAE has been among the most active adopters of AI driven government services, with initiatives focused on paperless operations, predictive citizen engagement, secure cross agency data exchange and automated public sector processes. At events including Dubai Airshow and Gitex Global, officials have emphasized the importance of sovereign AI and high performance computing for aviation safety systems, air mobility optimisation, energy modelling and national digital identity frameworks.
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