The CEO of Abu Dhabi-based G42, Peng Xiao, has said that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is anticipating the first shipments of advanced AI semiconductors “within months,” which will allow the first 200MW of a planned 1GW Stargate cluster to come online.

During an interview with Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos, Peng said beyond that, the plan is to then produce “anywhere between 200 to 500MW per quarter of additional capacity, on an ongoing basis” to eventually build out 5GW in the coming years.

Deliveries will “mostly” include chips from Nvidia, but G42 will also receive shipments from AMD and Cerebras Systems, Peng said, adding that the company had to give security assurances to the US government in order to secure the export licenses. This included demonstrating there was no possibility for the chips to be shipped elsewhere, or there was no back door for remote access by “unapproved parties.”

The Trump administration approved chip sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in late November 2025, with the export licenses allowing each country’s so-called ‘AI champion’ – which, for the UAE, is G42 – to purchase up to 35,000 worth of Nvidia GB300 systems or their equivalent.

The approval was granted six months after the US signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with the UAE, which resulted in a host of high-profile data center announcements in the region, including the aforementioned 5GW data center. Dubbed the UAE-US AI Campus, the facility will span ten square miles across Abu Dhabi and be run by G42 and American hyperscalers.

Commenting on the UAE’s recent addition to the US-led Pax Silica initiative, Peng said he expected the group would open up new opportunities for G42, noting that US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, Jacob Helberg, had been in Abu Dhabi recently to engage in discussions.

“We fully support his vision and his team’s architecture to build out not just data centers, but support the global supply chain,” Peng said. “By working with such an architecture, G42 will go beyond building infrastructure [and] also become an enabler in every level of the global supply chain.”

G42 is an Emirati artificial intelligence (AI) development holding company funding data center projects in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. It also owns regional data center operator Khazna.

The chair and controlling shareholder of G42, Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the brother of the UAE president. Tahnoun is also the nation's national security adviser and chair of Stargate-backer MGX.

In November 2025, the company announced it was partnering with Microsoft to expand data center capacity in the UAE by 200MW, with the additional capacity set to be provided by Khazna. The plans formed part of a commitment from the hyperscaler to invest an additional $7.9bn in the UAE between 2026 and the end of 2029, bringing its total investment in the country to $15.2bn.

Microsoft previously invested $1.5bn in G42 in April 2024 for a minority stake in the AI firm, and was the first company to be granted an export license by the Trump administration, allowing it to ship Nvidia GPUs to the UAE.