Oracle is expanding its Abu Dhabi cloud region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a "Supercluster" deployment of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

Oracle's Superclusters are large-scale clusters of GPUs dedicated to AI workloads. The new cluster will feature more than 4,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and aims to help support sovereign AI initiatives in the Middle East.

“This deployment marks a decisive moment for Abu Dhabi and the entire Middle East region,” said Nick Redshaw, SVP cloud infrastructure, Middle East and Africa, at Oracle. “By bringing the region’s first OCI Supercluster to Abu Dhabi, we are giving governments and enterprises across the Middle East direct access to some of the world’s most advanced AI compute capabilities, right here in-region. OCI is the platform of choice for AI training and inferencing, and the combination of its performance, security, and deployment flexibility with Nvidia AI infrastructure, enabling us to deliver AI capabilities at scale and accelerate AI adoption across the Middle East.”

“This partnership delivers unprecedented compute and performance at scale, supporting Abu Dhabi's vision of an AI-native government by 2027,” added Marc Domenech, senior regional director of Enterprise META, Nvidia. “By integrating Nvidia accelerated computing with OCI’s secure, distributed cloud, we are ensuring nations have the specialized 'AI Factory' required to innovate locally while maintaining data control.”

Plans for the Supercluster come just a week after the US eased restrictions on chip sales to the UAE. The UAE's G42 and Saudi Arabia's Humain are reportedly set to buy up to 35,000 GB300s - or equivalent - each.

The Supercluster in the UAE is set to be far smaller than others deployed by Oracle thus far. In October, the company revealed plans for its Zettascale10 cluster that would initially target 800,000 GPUs.

Oracle has two cloud regions in the UAE: UAE East, located in Dubai, which launched in September 2020, and UAE Central in Abu Dhabi, which launched in November 2021. It also offers a sovereign cloud platform in the UAE with telecoms company Du, which was expanded to include AI services for the UAE government in June 2024.

At the start of this year, the company revealed it planned to increase its investment in the UAE fivefold to meet the growing demand. A further $14bn was later committed to neighboring Saudi Arabia.