The UAE spent two years winning access to American AI chips. Now it is renting them out.

A bank in Dubai that wants to train an AI model on its own customer records has, until recently, had three options and no good one. Put the work on a global cloud, and explain to a regulator why customer data now sits on infrastructure run by an American company. Buy chips and build somewhere to keep them, which meant a capital project and a US export licence, granted case by case, for hardware Washington had spent two years deciding whether to let into the country at all. Or shelve it.

On July 20, e& UAE and Core42 put a fourth option on the market: the chips that AI runs on, housed in the UAE, rented rather than bought. Core42 owns the hardware and sells access to it. The licence was somebody else’s problem, the data never leaves the country, and there is no capital outlay to begin.

Two of the terms are worth slowing down for. The companies promise no capital expenditure requirement, so the spend starts small and scales with use instead of arriving as a multimillion-dollar purchase order. And they advertise zero egress fees, the charge a cloud provider normally applies when you move your data off its platform, priced per gigabyte, trivial at first and painful once you have years of it. Egress fees are a large part of why companies stay put even when something better appears, and waiving them is a provider betting it can win on merit rather than on the cost of leaving.

Set that against the last two years of sovereign-AI news, which was almost entirely governments arguing with each other: export controls, security undertakings, the vetting the UAE submitted to before Washington eased the licence rule this month. That easing is narrower than the headlines made it sound: licence-free buying is confined to a named list of approved entities, which includes G42 and Core42 and does not include a bank in Dubai. All of that answered one question: whether the country could have the hardware. It never answered the question a company acts on, which is whether it can buy the capability this quarter and what it will cost.

It helps to be concrete about what the newest chips buy that older ones did not. Ordinary machine learning on private data has been possible in the Gulf for years, on hardware nobody needed a licence for: a fraud model over claims history, a classifier on scans. What advanced chips add is the ability to run and adapt frontier-scale models, the general-purpose systems a Gulf institution could previously reach only by calling an American API and sending its data along with the request. Renting this capacity is what puts the model and the data in the same building.

Which is why the scarce thing is about to change. Getting hold of chips was the hard part, and it rewarded whoever could work export policy. Now that anyone can rent them, the advantage moves to whoever knows which of those jobs is worth doing at all, and that is a question about how a Gulf bank or hospital actually runs rather than about hardware.

Related

• The UAE can now buy advanced US AI chips without asking each time
• Before the UAE won license-free access to US AI chips, the CIA sent a spy to vet G42
• Saudi Arabia wants to run its own AI. It’s turning to Canada’s Cohere to build it.