To keep its chips, G42 goes American

G42 took its name from Douglas Adams, whose supercomputer, asked for the answer to life, the universe and everything, spent seven and a half million years arriving at the number 42. Abu Dhabi's version has been given 270 days. On September 4th Bloomberg reported that executives at the emirate's flagship AI firm, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE's national security adviser and the president's brother, have held exploratory talks about selling a majority stake to American companies, or standing up a new vehicle in the United States, so that it can keep buying Nvidia's chips past next spring.

The logic from Abu Dhabi's side is plain enough. G42 is building the 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus, which at full scale would draw roughly the output of five nuclear reactors, and inside it the 1-gigawatt Stargate UAE cluster whose first 200 megawatts are due to light this year. In November Washington cleared the firm for up to 35,000 of Nvidia's GB300-class systems; on July 10th the Commerce Department lifted the UAE into Country Group A:5, the tier it reserves for Japan and South Korea, and let G42 and its cloud arm, Core42, buy Nvidia, AMD and Cerebras silicon with no license at all. No lender finances a gigawatt on a permission that lapses before the first hall is commissioned. Ownership turns a license into a property right, and property rights do not need renewing.