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https://www.semafor.com/article/09/13/2024/how-the-uae-got-the-us-to-bless-its-ai-ambitions
ABU DHABI — The US has approved the sale of cutting-edge Nvidia chips to G42, the company at the center of the United Arab Emirates' efforts to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
The approval, which came earlier this year but has not been reported, is a major milestone for the ambitions of the UAE and the broader Gulf region. The area is becoming an increasingly important global technology hub — but Biden administration concerns about their ties to China have been obstacles to gaining access to key assets, like cutting-edge chips, which face US export curbs to the region.
G42 is only just beginning to deploy the chips, including a sizable order of Nvidia H100 models, but the effort has been years in the making. Long before ChatGPT captivated the world and global demand for Nvidia's most advanced AI chips exploded, the UAE was laying the groundwork to be a serious competitor in the global AI race.
It has made significant, long-term investments in innovations that protect sensitive data, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone but the owner to access. Semafor has learned new details of those efforts, which helped lead US officials to approve the sale of the AI chips.
New data centers in the country are physically locked down and have been built from the ground up with hardware made exclusively by Western nations to avoid the possibility of a Chinese backdoor, people familiar with the matter said.
Older data centers have been stripped of any parts with ties to China, even if those parts are unplugged and not being used.
The compute portion of its data centers, which use military-level FIPS 140-2 encryption, is physically separated from all other systems, from security cameras to cooling. That separation reduces the likelihood that attackers could use vulnerabilities in ancillary hardware to worm their way into the servers.
Customers, workers, and visitors are all screened extensively, and Chinese nationals are not allowed to work at the data centers.
The facilities employ wide-ranging telemetry of everything that happens inside, giving G42 the ability to monitor anomalies in real time, including fluctuations in compute levels that might suggest a customer is building AI models large enough to create national security concerns.
It has also hired US Department of Defense contractors to "red team" its data center defenses to find any holes that might allow intrusions by the Chinese or others.
And since last year, G42 has been training its advanced AI models in data centers in California and Texas through a commercial partnership with AI chip maker Cerebras, as it builds its infrastructure in the UAE.
In a sign of the region's growing tech importance, Microsoft in April made a $1.5 billion investment in G42, a move that drew some criticism in Washington because of the UAE firm's past investments in Chinese AI ventures and whether that could lead to intellectual property and advanced hardware flowing to America's most powerful rival. Microsoft President Brad Smith joined G42's board of directors.
G42 and Nvidia declined to comment.
Semafor reported earlier this week that a likely approval for Nvidia chips is drawing nearer for Saudi Arabia.
