UAE to build 8-exaflop AI supercomputer in India

ABU DHABI: Abu Dhabi will establish a national-scale artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in India with a computing capacity of 8 exaflops, marking a new phase in the country’s AI infrastructure development.

The project was announced on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi.

It follows the fifth India-UAE Strategic Dialogue, held in December 2025, and the visit of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to India in January 2026, which strengthened cooperation in defence, technology, space, and energy.

The system will be delivered by G42, an Abu Dhabi-based global technology group, and US company Cerebras, which manufactures high-performance AI computing systems.

The initiative also involves Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a postgraduate AI research university in Abu Dhabi, and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a government-run body specialising in supercomputing and advanced IT research.

An 8 exaflop system is capable of performing eight quintillion calculations per second — that is, eight billion operations every second — placing it among the world’s most powerful computing platforms.

Officials say this will significantly expand India’s domestic capacity to train and run advanced AI models.

The supercomputer will be hosted within India and operate under governance frameworks defined by Indian authorities. All data will remain within national jurisdiction to meet sovereign security and regulatory requirements.

The project builds on earlier cooperation between G42 and MBZUAI. In December 2025, the two organisations released NANDA 87B, an open-source Hindi-English large language model containing 87 billion parameters, designed to support AI applications in regional languages.