UAE Targets 60 Trillion AI Tokens To Become 'Factory of Intelligence'
Producing 60 trillion tokens is part of a national effort to turn AI compute into an economic advantage, says AI minister Omar Al Olama.
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[Image source: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
The UAE is outlining plans to produce 60 trillion AI tokens through its emerging Stargate data-centre cluster—an output officials say would represent roughly 60% of global production. The effort is part of a broader national strategy to position the country as the “world’s factory of intelligence,” Minister of State for AI, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications Omar Al Olama said at the Milken Middle East and Africa Summit in Abu Dhabi on Thursday.
Tokens—tiny units representing fragments of text, punctuation, or characters—are the fundamental building blocks of generative AI systems. Converting raw data into tokens, a process known as tokenization, underpins everything from building large language models to running AI assistants.
Al Olama said, “The currency of the future is going to be tokens, that can be used and transformed into insights or intelligence that will help in decision-making, improve the quality of life and improve productivity”. While he did not provide a timeline for reaching the 60 trillion-token target, he noted that “many fundamentals need to check out,” including hardware supply, energy availability, and the build-out schedule for Stargate’s multi-gigawatt footprint.
Stargate is being developed as a 1-gigawatt data centre, with 200 megawatts expected to come online in 2026. It is part of a planned 5-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi, one of the world’s largest such projects. The UAE’s approach is incremental but aggressive: “We are going to increase capacity as demand increases,” Al Olama said, emphasizing that the 5-GW target could shift but reflects current projections of compute requirements. He also pushed back on fears of an AI-driven market bubble, arguing that historical comparisons to the dot-com boom overlook long-term technological arcs. “If your time frame was five years, the word ‘bubble’ was right. If it was 20, it was wrong,” he said.
The minister also highlighted early economic returns. AI-enabled optimisation in energy production has already saved the UAE an estimated Dh500 million ($136 million).
The infrastructure push coincides with new talent-building initiatives. The Tahnoon bin Zayed Scholarship in AI Excellence, launched by the country’s AI and Advanced Technology Council, will fund up to 350 undergraduates over six years at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). The program prioritizes mathematical strength, entrepreneurial capability, and leadership potential, with recipients representing the UAE in global youth and technology forums.
These investments sit alongside the UAE’s broader AI ecosystem strategy, which includes partnerships with Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI; development of foundational Arabic-language models such as Falcon; and the joint US–UAE plan for a 5-GW AI “mega campus.”
