Infrastructure · Trend
UAE Data Center Advantage for AI Infrastructure
GovAI analysis examines whether the UAE offers structural advantages for American hyperscalers building data centers, amid growing geopolitical competition over AI compute infrastructure.
Forecast horizon
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How this node ties into the rest of the map, and the evidence behind each link.
from · informs 4/10
Virtual Power Plants for AI Data Center Energy Both trends address the energy and infrastructure constraints shaping where AI compute capacity is built globally.
+4 growth from · tracked by 3/10
Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) GovAI published a technical report analyzing whether the UAE has an advantage in building data centers for AI.
+3 growthSignal sources
Signal sources
Dated facts from primary sources in this direction.
Compute scaling 2024
Training compute for frontier AI models grew ~4–5× per year from 2010 to 2024 — a trend Epoch projects to continue toward 2030.
Epoch AI → Data-center energy 2025
Global data-centre electricity use is projected to roughly double from ~485 TWh (2025) to ~950 TWh by 2030 — about 3% of world electricity.
International Energy Agency → Inference cost collapse 2022–2024
The price to query a GPT-3.5-level model fell from $20.00 to $0.07 per million tokens between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024 — a 280× drop in ~18 months.
Stanford HAI — AI Index 2025 → Open-weight frontier Jan 2025
DeepSeek disclosed its open-weight R1 reasoning model's final training run cost just $294,000; R1 was released under open weights on 20 Jan 2025.
Nature / DeepSeek →