United Arab Emirates

• The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) steering committee is reported to have announced a common regional AI policy — shared principles on AI ethics, data privacy, security and cross-border cooperation among member states — as a step toward a unified Gulf AI strategy. Details on scope, timeline and enforcement remain thin in early reporting, and the UAE's role in implementation is not yet clear.

  2026-08

  SourceID Times

• US Commerce Department (BIS) reclassifies the UAE from Export Administration Regulations Country Groups D:3/D:4 into Country Group A:5, the highest trust tier, removing individual export-license requirements for approved UAE entities (including G42) to receive NVIDIA Blackwell and AMD Instinct chips — though for G42 and its Core42 unit, legal analyses describe this as a roughly 270-day pre-approval window rather than a permanent exemption, per Supplement No. 8 to Part 740.

  Major

  2026-07-10

  SourceUS Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS)Federal Register

• Omar Sultan Al Olama confirmed as chair of the new AI and Data Authority.

  2026-06

  SourceITP.net

• UAE approves a new Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority, merging the Office of AI/Digital Economy/Remote Work Applications, the UAE Data Office, and the TDRA's digital-government portfolio.

  Major

  2026-06

  SourceITP.net

• MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models, with G42 and Cerebras, releases K2 Think V2, a roughly 70-billion-parameter open reasoning system built on the K2-V2 base model and billed as fully sovereign and open from pre-training data through post-training — a second UAE frontier-adjacent model line alongside TII's Falcon family.

  2026-01

  SourceMBZUAI / PR Newswire

• TII launches Falcon-H1 Arabic, described as the world's leading Arabic-language LLM using a hybrid Mamba-Transformer architecture.

  2026

  SourceTechnology Innovation Institute

• TII launches Falcon Perception, an efficient multimodal model reported to have roughly 600 million parameters.

  2026

  SourceComputer Weekly

• Construction of Stargate UAE — a 1GW AI compute cluster built by G42's Khazna Data Centers within a planned 5GW Abu Dhabi 'UAE–US AI Campus' and operated with OpenAI and Oracle (partners also include NVIDIA, Cisco and SoftBank) — continues, with the 200MW first phase, reported to use around 100,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, said to be on course for completion in the third quarter of 2026. It is widely described as the largest AI data-centre build outside the US.

  Major

  2026

  SourceOpenAIThe National

• US Commerce Department authorizes G42 to purchase up to 35,000 NVIDIA Blackwell (GB300) chips.

  2025-11-19

  SourceCNBC

UAE AI research and development runs largely through the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied-research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council, and MBZUAI, an Abu Dhabi-based university widely described as the world's first dedicated AI research university. MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models, with G42 and Cerebras, produces the K2 Think open reasoning models (V2 released January 2026), while TII maintains the open-weight Falcon family — giving the UAE two distinct sovereign model programmes.

• AI-specific think tanks

  No dedicated, independent UAE-based AI-policy think tank was identified in this audit. Adjacent bodies exist — Dubai's 'Think AI' initiative (a government-EY convening on AI policy) and an Abu Dhabi 'AI Centre of Excellence' oriented more toward research and commercialization — but neither reads as a traditional policy think tank, so this may reflect a genuine gap or simply incomplete search coverage.

• Export-control conditionality

  Coverage of the UAE's July 2026 export-control reclassification often describes G42's license-free access to advanced AI chips as settled, but law-firm analyses of the underlying BIS rule (Supplement No. 8 to Part 740) indicate this status for G42 and Core42 is a time-limited pre-approval window (roughly 270 days) rather than a permanent exemption, unless they become US-headquartered within that period.

Deliberately sourced beyond government publications. The bars below show each category’s actual share of this page’s citations — an internal editorial guideline rather than a rigorously derived target, so treat it as a rough steer, not a precise benchmark.

1. UAE establishes federal authority for AI and dataNewsITP.net2026-06
2. UAE unveils Falcon PerceptionResearchComputer Weekly2026
3. TII launches Falcon-H1 ArabicResearchTechnology Innovation Institute2026
4. US approves AI chip exports to Gulf after Saudi crown prince visitNewsCNBC2025-11
5. US export rules keep the UAE in an AI technology slow laneNewsAGBI2026-07
6. Department of Commerce Eases Export Controls for UAEGovernmentUS Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS)2026-07
7. Enhanced Favorable Treatment for the United Arab Emirates Under the Export Administration RegulationsGovernmentFederal Register2026-07-14
8. Core42 (G42's cloud and AI-infrastructure company)IndustryCore42
9. Introducing Stargate UAEIndustryOpenAI2026
10. Stargate UAE's first phase to be completed in third quarter of 2026NewsThe National2025-12
11. MBZUAI Launches K2 Think V2: UAE's Fully Sovereign, Next-Generation Reasoning SystemResearchMBZUAI / PR Newswire2026-01
12. GCC steering committee announces AI policyNewsID Times2026-08