An Abu Dhabi company called Aleria is building out what it describes as sovereign AI infrastructure, and it is doing so on both sides of the Atlantic.
According to the Khaleej Times, Aleria plans to bring up to 16,000 Nvidia chips to the United States as part of a sovereign AI push. Gulf News reports the deployment spans both the US and the UAE, putting the figure at 16,000 Nvidia AI chips across the two countries.
The Khaleej Times adds two details worth noting. First, the infrastructure is built on Nvidia compute paired with DDN storage architecture — in other words, the chips that do the calculating are matched with a storage system designed to feed them data fast enough to keep them busy. Second, the setup is already operational in both the US and the UAE, meaning this is not purely a future commitment but a system that is at least partly running today.
The phrase doing the heavy lifting here is "sovereign AI." It refers to a country or a company within it owning and operating the computing power that trains and runs AI models, rather than renting capacity from a handful of overseas cloud providers. For Gulf states, that has become a strategic priority: whoever controls the hardware controls what gets built on it and where the data sits.
The cross-border shape of the deal is the interesting part. Rather than keeping all its capacity at home, an Abu Dhabi firm is installing a substantial share of it inside the United States — a country that has spent recent years tightening rules over where advanced AI chips can go.
Neither source item provides financial terms, a timeline, or the specific Nvidia chip models involved, so those remain open questions.
Why it matters: AI capability increasingly comes down to who has access to scarce, expensive chips, and a Gulf company operating thousands of them on US soil is a concrete sign that the race for AI computing power is now being run across borders rather than within them.