The hot wind in the desert swept over the empty construction site on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi. A few months ago, the land was being leveled according to the blueprint of the 10 square mile super AI park. Now, the drawings in the hands of engineers have quietly changed versions. The "Stargate" super park, which was originally supposed to pile up 5 gigawatts of computing power at once, no longer pursues erecting densely packed server cabinets on the same sandy land, but instead breaks down the computing power into different modules and spreads it to multiple locations throughout the United Arab Emirates.

From a centralized blueprint to a distributed computing power network

In May 2025, the United Arab Emirates and the United States jointly launched this AI park, which was originally intended to build the largest AI computing hub outside the United States. The planned 26 square kilometer contiguous park could accommodate over 2.5 million high-end AI chips in one go, theoretically providing low latency AI services to nearly half of the world's population.

Until March 2026, the changing regional situation completely shifted this blueprint, with Iran listing the Middle East facilities of 18 US affiliated technology companies as legitimate targets for attack. Subsequently, AWS suffered damage to three cloud nodes in the UAE and Bahrain, and the AI infrastructure logic in the Gulf region was rewritten overnight.

The project team has not stopped the construction process, and the first phase of the 200 MW computing power cluster is still progressing according to plan and will be officially put into operation within the year. The remaining 4.8 gigawatts of computing power will no longer be squeezed into the same park. The training cluster, inference nodes, and cold data storage will be dismantled into different units and deployed to secure locations in different cities. Even the previously centralized submarine fiber optic cable access and grid connection ports will be changed to multi-path redundancy design.

Put multi-layer bulletproof vests on the computing power

Engineers have implemented layers of protection for every new computing power node. Surrounding radar and electronic jamming equipment can intercept incoming small drones and cruise missiles in advance; The exterior walls of the core computer room have been replaced with thickened blast resistant concrete, and some facilities that carry sensitive government and military data have been directly chiseled into the interior of the mountain. Even the cooling pipes for server heat dissipation have been reinforced with explosion-proof measures.

Each node is equipped with two completely independent backup power and cooling systems, which can operate autonomously for more than 72 hours even if the external power grid is interrupted. Keywords: AI data center, computing hub

In the past, the AI data centers that people used to remember were often vast parks spread out in a contiguous manner. Now, engineers in the United Arab Emirates are writing a new story in the desert: computing power is no longer concentrated in a single oil deposit, but a distributed resilient network scattered throughout the country with layers of defense.Editor/Cheng Liting