The UAE recently announced that it will produce 60 trillion artificial intelligence tokens to become the “world’s factory of intelligence.” The country is planning to create these through the Stargate AI campus in Abu Dhabi—a massive hyperscale data centre project.
What are AI tokens?
AI tokens are small units of data created by breaking down larger pieces of information. AI models process these tokens to learn relationships between them, enabling capabilities such as prediction, generation, and reasoning. The faster tokens are processed, the quicker models can learn and respond.
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A new class of data centres called AI factories convert data into tokens, process them at massive speed, and generate new tokens as intelligent outputs. While traditional data centres store and process data, for general-purpose computing, AI factories are optimised to create value from AI. The AI factories are manufacturing intelligence at scale by transforming raw data into real-time insights.
For AI factories, intelligence is the primary product, and this intelligence is measured by AI token throughput—how many tokens an AI system (or cluster) can process or generate per second
The scale of plans
If the UAE created 60 trillion artificial intelligence tokens, it would be equivalent to about 60 per cent of global production of AI tokens. Notably AI tokens are more than just a technical metric. In an era where AI drives economic output, national security, and global influence, the ability to produce, control, and scale these tokens at unprecedented volumes positions them as a modern equivalent to oil or rare earth minerals. AI tokens directly translate to revenue in the booming AI services economy and it will play a key role in the UAE’s plans for diversifying. The UAE is apparently moving forward with the view that controlling token throughput secures exportable intelligence while funding domestic innovation.
AI bubble fears
The UAE, with the backing of the US, is planning to have an AI campus in Abu Dhabi that is expected to grow to some 5GW. The Stargate, which is planning to build a capacity of 1 gigawatt, is expected to operate on a 200-megawatt capacity in 2026. Even though multiple analysts have pointed to overvaluations in the AI market, the UAE sees it from an optimistic point of view.
While talking at the recent Milken Middle East and Africa Summit in Abu Dhabi, Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications of the UAE, said that the dot-com bubble was a bubble in that time period, but in hindsight one could see that the internet was not a bubble. He noted that the largest companies in the world became internet companies, and it transformed our lives; similarly, the UAE looks at 5 GW plan from that long time frame, where it sees AI giants emerging as the winners. The UAE moves forward with the idea that even if there is a near-term AI valuation correction, the underlying infrastructure will still be valuable 10–15 years from now, just as the internet backbone in 2002 was valuable despite the crash.