The UAE will establish a national-scale AI supercomputer in India with 8 exaflops of compute power, marking a major step in expanding India’s AI infrastructure, WAM reported.
The system is being delivered by Abu Dhabi-based G42 and Cerebras, in partnership with Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Announced at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, the project follows the 5th India-UAE Strategic Dialogue in December 2025 and the visit of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to India in January 2026, which strengthened cooperation across technology, defense, space, and energy sectors.
At 8 exaflops, the supercomputer represents India’s first exaflop-scale AI infrastructure, dramatically boosting domestic compute capacity for advanced AI research and development. Hosted within India, it will operate under national governance frameworks, ensuring all data remains under local jurisdiction and meets sovereign security requirements.
Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, said, “Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness. This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling researchers, innovators, and enterprises to be AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty.”
The system will be accessible to India’s full AI ecosystem, including universities, startups, SMEs, and government agencies, offering a democratized platform to foster AI innovation for applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, and other sectors serving India’s 1.4 billion population.
Richard Morton, Executive Director of MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models, noted, “This collaboration expands access to advanced AI compute for researchers and students, enabling breakthroughs in areas critical to society.” Andy Hock, Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras, added that the system, purpose-built for large-scale AI workloads, will accelerate training and inference for complex models tailored to India’s needs.
This initiative follows G42 and MBZUAI’s December 2025 release of the open-source Hindi-English large language model NANDA 87B, with 87 billion parameters, reflecting the UAE’s ongoing support for building domestic AI capability worldwide.
The 8-exaflop supercomputer underscores India’s growing role as a hub for regional AI innovation, strengthening its ability to develop, deploy, and scale advanced AI securely within its borders.
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