UAE Redesigns $30B Stargate AI Campus After Drone Strikes Hit Data Centres in UAE, Bahrain

Physical security has become as urgent a design constraint for Gulf AI infrastructure as cooling capacity or chip supply. According to Reuters, citing six sources including a US official and a Western diplomat, the UAE is revising the master plan for its Stargate UAE AI campus, moving away from a single, consolidated 26-square-kilometre site near Abu Dhabi toward a distributed network of smaller, hardened facilities, some potentially built underground or inside mountains, with air defences, blast-resistant concrete and duplicated power and cooling systems.

The trigger was not hypothetical. Two Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE and a third facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone and missile strikes in March, and Iran's armed forces released a video in April explicitly naming the Stargate UAE site, located near Al Dhafra Air Base, as a potential military target. Reuters could not determine how close Emirati authorities are to finalising the new masterplan, or how the changes will affect construction costs and timelines, but four of the six sources specifically confirmed the shift toward a distributed architecture.

The project sits at the centre of the UAE's AI ambitions. Stargate UAE is led by G42, the Abu Dhabi AI company controlled by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, in partnership with Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Cisco and SoftBank. The first phase, a $30 billion, one-gigawatt compute cluster, began construction last year, with the first 200 megawatts of capacity expected online this year, en route to a full five-gigawatt build-out. G42's on-record response to Reuters was carefully hedged rather than confirmatory: the project's specifics are "subject to continuous review in line with the security, resilience and operational standards expected of critical infrastructure at this scale." OpenAI separately said it continues making "good progress on the infrastructure and adoption priorities needed to deliver it."

The redesign is a direct, physical validation of a warning this site reported from the HiLi Forum in Abu Dhabi earlier this month. Talal AlKaissi, CEO of Core42 and Acting Group Chief Global Affairs Officer at G42, told the forum that "no one architected the data centre thinking that you would have kinetic threats," pointing to the emergence of cheap drones as a physical risk to infrastructure historically treated as a purely digital concern. The Stargate redesign confirms that warning was not rhetorical, it is now shaping how the region's largest AI infrastructure project is actually being rebuilt, mid-construction.

For GCC security and infrastructure planners, this case is a useful, concrete reference point precisely because it moves physical protection of data centres from a theoretical OT concern into an active, budgeted design requirement. UAE compliance frameworks already treat physical and environmental security of data centres, server rooms and facilities housing sensitive information as a defined control domain, but that domain has historically been written with insider threats, equipment failure and unauthorised access in mind, not blast-resistant construction against missile and drone strikes. The Stargate redesign suggests that framing now needs updating for any critical digital infrastructure operating in an active conflict zone, not just AI-specific mega-campuses.

The broader implication extends well beyond this one project. This site has already documented the convergence of cyber operations and kinetic attacks across the GCC and wider MENA region as a defining pattern of the current conflict, and the Stargate redesign is the clearest evidence yet that Gulf states and their infrastructure partners are treating that convergence as permanent rather than temporary. A $30 billion flagship project being restructured mid-build, rather than paused or relocated outright, signals the region's AI ambitions are proceeding despite the conflict, but on the explicit assumption that physical attacks on digital infrastructure are now a standing risk to design against, not an exceptional one to wait out.