The cloud heads for cover

The United Arab Emirates' planned artificial-intelligence campus is being redesigned around a new unit of account: the blast radius. The 5GW project was originally imagined as a concentrated, ten-square-mile development in Abu Dhabi. After Iranian attacks in the Gulf damaged regional infrastructure, Reuters reported that officials and companies are considering a distributed network of sites with stronger air defense, underground or blast-resistant elements, and more backup power and cooling. Compute sovereignty has acquired the physical logic of a military base.

The project remains immense. Its first phase is a $30bn, 1GW cluster known as Stargate UAE, with the first 200MW due in 2026. Those figures are plans, not operating capacity, but they show why concentration was attractive. One campus can share transmission, water, security and high-speed networking. It can also make procurement and construction repeatable. Five smaller sites would duplicate some of those fixed costs and complicate the tightly coupled networks used for large training jobs. Resilience is purchased partly by giving up the economics of contiguity.