The UAE recently announced that it will produce 60 trillion artificial intelligence tokens to become the “world's intelligence factory”. The country plans to create these through its Stargate AI Campus, a massive hyperscale data center project located in Abu Dhabi.
What is AI Token?
AI tokens are small units of data created by breaking down larger pieces of information. AI models process these tokens to learn the relationships between them, enabling functions such as prediction, generation, and inference. The faster the tokens are processed, the faster the model will learn and respond.
A new class of data centers called AI factories convert data into tokens, process them at high speed, and generate new tokens as intelligent output. Traditional data centers store and process data, but for general purpose computing, AI factories are optimized to generate value from AI. AI factories manufacture intelligence at scale by turning raw data into real-time insights.
For AI Factory, intelligence is a key product, and this intelligence is measured by AI token throughput, or the number of tokens that an AI system (or cluster) can process or generate per second.
Plan scale
If the UAE creates 60 trillion artificial intelligence tokens, that would represent about 60% of the world's AI token production. In particular, AI tokens are more than just technical indicators. In an era where AI drives economic production, national security, and global influence, the ability to produce, manage, and scale these tokens in unprecedented quantities has placed them on a modern par with oil and rare earth minerals. The AI token will directly tap into the revenue of the burgeoning AI services economy and play a key role in the UAE's diversification plans. The UAE appears to be moving forward with the view that by controlling the throughput of its tokens, it can ensure exportable intelligence while funding domestic innovation.
Fear of AI bubble
The UAE, with support from the US, is planning to build an AI campus in Abu Dhabi, which is expected to grow to around 5GW. Stargate plans to build 1 gigawatt of capacity and is expected to come online in 2026 with a capacity of 200 megawatts. Despite several analysts pointing to the overvaluation of the AI market, the UAE views this from an optimistic perspective.
While speaking at the recent Milken Middle East and Africa Summit in Abu Dhabi, Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, said that while the dotcom bubble was a bubble at the time, in hindsight we can see that the internet was not a bubble. He pointed out that the world's largest companies have become Internet companies, and that has changed our lives. Similarly, the UAE is considering its 5 GW plan due to its long time horizon and sees AI giants emerging as winners. The UAE is moving forward with the idea that even if AI valuations are revised in the short term, the underlying infrastructure will still be valuable 10-15 years from now, just as the internet backbone was valuable despite the crash in 2002.
