Why I Moved to the UAE to Be at the Forefront of Sovereign AI

I moved to the UAE for a simple reason: this is where sovereign AI is actually being built, not just talked about. The models, the compute, the national strategy, and the industrial demand all sit in the same place, and I wanted to work at the center of that. Not read about it from a distance.

What is sovereign AI, and why does it matter?

Sovereign AI is the ability of a country to build, run, and govern AI on its own terms — its own compute, its own data, its own models, aligned with its own strategy and priorities. It’s the difference between consuming AI built elsewhere and producing it at home. For a nation, that’s not a technical detail; it’s a question of economic growth, security, and independence.

Most of the world is still deciding whether sovereign AI is a real priority. The UAE already decided.

Why the UAE?

Because ambition here is backed by execution. Abu Dhabi is building foundational models, standing up serious compute, and treating AI as national infrastructure rather than a line item. There’s a rare density to it — capital, talent, industry, and government pointing in the same direction at the same time. Decisions that would take years elsewhere happen in months.

For someone who spent a career at the intersection of technology, industry, and investing, that combination (frontier AI meeting real physical assets, energy, and national strategy) is exactly where the interesting problems are.

What I’m doing here

I’m Head of Programs, Applied AI Products at AI71 in Abu Dhabi, focused on moving organizations from AI experimentation to AI-first operating models. My work sits where AI meets large organizations, legacy systems, governance, and scale. In other words, the layers where sovereign ambition either becomes a shipped, governed, deployed system — or stalls.

The bet

My bet is that the next decade of AI won’t be won only by whoever trains the best model. It’ll be won by whoever can operationalize it, and turn strategy and compute into systems that actually run, under real constraints, at national scale. The Gulf is where that bet is being placed most aggressively, and I’d rather help build it from the inside than comment on it from the outside.

That’s why I’m here — and it’s what I write about.