Abu Dhabi expects power demand to double by 2050, with installed generating capacity rising from roughly 25 GW to 50 GW. Meanwhile Khazna has raised a $2.62bn bank facility, broken ground on 60 MW across two Abu Dhabi sites for completion this year, and the first 200 MW of Stargate UAE is due online in 2026 - on a 10-square-mile campus in a climate that makes cooling the costliest part of the build.
Abu Dhabi is planning for its installed generating capacity to roughly double, from about 25 gigawatts today to some 50 GW, as electricity demand across the emirate doubles by 2050. The projection, set out this month, is a long-horizon planning number. The load that has prompted much of the rethink is being built on a considerably shorter one.
The most visible piece of it is Stargate UAE, the artificial intelligence infrastructure cluster in Abu Dhabi being developed by G42 with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, SoftBank Group and Cisco. Its first 200 megawatts is due to come online during 2026 inside what is planned as a 1 GW compute cluster, itself the opening stage of a wider UAE-US AI campus designed to reach 5 GW across roughly 10 square miles, drawing on a mix of nuclear, solar and gas generation.
Ten square miles is about 26 square kilometres. That is a land take on the scale of a refinery complex or a large port, assembled for buildings that are, structurally, sheds full of electrical and mechanical plant. Site assembly of that size is straightforward in Abu Dhabi in a way it is not in most markets - the land is state-held, flat and empty - and it is a genuine competitive advantage that has nothing to do with technology. What it does mean is that internal roads, water, drainage, substations and fibre have to be built across the whole footprint before the first hall is energised, which is civil and electrical contracting work rather than data centre work.
The projects actually under construction are smaller and further along. Khazna Data Centers, the G42 subsidiary that operates most of the country's hyperscale capacity, has raised a $2.62bn financing facility from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and First Abu Dhabi Bank with a tenor of up to ten years, funding two new data centres in Abu Dhabi, one in Dubai and the region's first artificial intelligence-enabled facility in Ajman. Two of those broke ground in April: AUH4 at Mafraq and AUH8 in Masdar City, providing 60 MW between them, with completions scheduled for August and December this year. The Ajman site, at 100 MW, is being built as 20 data halls of 5 MW of IT capacity each, with its first phase due to complete in December.
The 5 MW hall is the operative design decision. Building in identical modules lets a developer energise, commission and let capacity in tranches, so revenue starts against the first halls while the last are still being fitted out, and each hall can be connected as grid capacity becomes available rather than waiting on a single large connection. It also standardises the mechanical and electrical package, which is what compresses a build to twelve or eighteen months.
Separately, Microsoft and G42 have a 200 MW capacity expansion in the UAE ramping before the end of the year. Taken together with the Khazna programme, the capacity under construction is of a similar order to everything the country has already built: UAE operational colocation capacity stands at more than 400 MW, the largest base in the GCC, having passed 376 MW of live capacity during 2025. The sector is not growing at the margin; it is doubling.
On the supply side, Emirates Water and Electricity Company has raised its solar target to more than 17.5 GW by 2030 and is procuring a series of 1.5 GW plants, with clean and renewable generation expected to rise from around 45 per cent of the mix to 60 per cent within five years. The UAE also holds an asset most of its regional competitors do not: the Barakah nuclear plant, four units of roughly 1.4 GW each, producing firm output around the clock. For a customer buying power for a facility that runs at high utilisation every hour of the year, a grid with several gigawatts of nuclear baseload plus contracted solar-and-storage capacity is a materially easier proposition to underwrite than one without.
The structural disadvantage is heat. Summer ambient temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius change the economics of every rejection system in the building. Air-cooled chillers sized for that design condition need more heat exchange surface, more fan power and more installed redundancy than the same duty in a temperate climate, and they lose efficiency exactly when the grid is at its own peak. The alternative is water, which is expensive to produce in a desalination economy and politically awkward to consume at scale. High-density racks intended for AI training push the answer toward direct liquid cooling at the rack, which raises capital cost but keeps the heat in a smaller, hotter loop that is cheaper to reject. Either way, cooling plant is a larger share of the construction budget in the Gulf than almost anywhere else, and the contractors who benefit most are the mechanical and electrical specialists rather than the main civil builders.
The sequencing is the part worth watching. A data hall can be built in twelve to eighteen months. A gas turbine, a solar plant with storage or a new transmission corridor cannot. That mismatch is why developers here are being financed against ten-year bank facilities and why capacity is being built in 5 MW increments beside generation that arrives in gigawatt steps. The emirate's plan to double its generating fleet runs to 2050. The buildings that will draw on it are being handed over this year.