The United Arab Emirates is building a powerful position in artificial intelligence, and Nvidia’s chips sit at the center of that rise. Now Nvidia is adding a new piece to the strategy: a free AI model aimed at the UAE and other countries that want more control over the technology they use.
The move could bring the UAE closer to the United States, even as the country works to build its own AI systems. That tension sits at the heart of the story. The UAE wants access to the best global technology, but it also wants models, data, and computing systems that it can control at home.
Nvidia wants its model to become the starting point
Last month, Nvidia spent $7 billion to buy a stake in Poolside, a U.S. coding startup, and license the tools Poolside uses to build AI models. Poolside’s new model is due by the end of the year, and anyone will be able to download it for free.
Nvidia’s wider goal is to make Nemotron the base countries choose when they build their own AI systems. Governments now mostly start with a free model made by Meta or Alibaba, then adapt it to their languages, laws, and local needs. Nvidia’s investment is designed to give those governments another starting point.
The plan fits Nvidia’s hardware position. The UAE’s flagship data center will run on 400,000 Nvidia chips, while the software running on those chips often comes from U.S. companies that decide what models can do and who can use them. Nvidia is scaling the factory that produces models for its chips and releasing those models as open weights, giving users more access to the systems beneath the applications.
That does not mean the UAE will abandon its own work. The Technology Innovation Institute, or TII, built Falcon in 2023 as a free alternative to models from the United States and China. Falcon ranked first on Counterpoint’s index of state-backed models this year, giving the UAE a homegrown system with global attention.
Control matters as much as access
TII’s chief researcher, Hakim Hacid, says the value of building AI at home goes beyond the final model. “The value is not limited to the models we ultimately produce, but it lies in mastering the underlying technology and retaining control,” he said.
Hacid also described the reason for keeping a strong local foundation: “As a model-building lab, we believe that maintaining diversity in AI perspectives, and preserving full technological sovereignty, requires a strong, homegrown foundation.” He added a simpler point: “Sovereignty does not mean isolation.”
That view helps explain why the UAE can work with Nvidia while continuing to develop Falcon. Hacid says TII can build its foundation at home while remaining open to the best technology from around the world. The choice is not between total independence and total dependence. It is about deciding which parts of the system the country can control.
Mohammed Soliman, a senior fellow at Middle East Institute, described sovereignty in similar terms. “Sovereignty was never about inventing the foundational model from scratch. It is about the model’s weights, how you fine-tune the data, and, most importantly at this stage, your ability to serve these models to users in the UAE and other markets.”
The UAE’s technology alignment is shifting
The UAE has already taken steps that link its AI ambitions to U.S. technology. G42, the state-backed AI company, cut its Chinese ties to win Nvidia’s chips. The U.S. government approved sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to the UAE after G42 sold its stakes in Chinese technology companies two years ago.
In July 2026, the U.S. placed the UAE in the group of countries it treats as its closest technology allies. G42 also joined Nvidia’s alliance in July, becoming the only Gulf company to do so. Its CEO, Peng Xiao, wrote on X that “Frontier open models are an essential part of that future, alongside frontier closed models, with security, trust and sovereign control designed in from the start rather than bolted on later.”
That alignment does not remove the UAE’s interest in Chinese AI. It shows instead how countries are trying to use different parts of the global technology market at once. Saudi Arabia offers a clear comparison: its state AI company, Humain, is cleared to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia chips, while Saudi Arabia introduced an Arabic model this month commissioned from a Chinese lab. A year earlier, Saudi Arabia launched a model it said was built from scratch in the kingdom.
Sam Winter-Levy, a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described the pattern this way: “It shows there’s little full-stack lock-in: The Saudis are using Chinese AI models to build their own models, while using U.S. chips to develop and run them.”
A contest for the next AI foundation
Chinese AI models were downloaded roughly 2 billion times this year, and Nvidia has agreed to pay almost $13 billion to buy Hugging Face, the platform for sharing AI models. Those numbers show why free models matter: distribution can shape which systems developers and governments use next.
The Poolside deal appears less about displacing existing model families than increasing future adoption of Nemotron in an ecosystem where Nvidia already holds a strong hardware position. If countries use Nvidia chips to train and run their systems, a free Nvidia model could make the company’s software a natural part of that same infrastructure.
For the UAE, the result may be a middle path. It can build Falcon and protect local control while using Nvidia chips and open models developed through the company’s growing network. The question is no longer whether a country must choose one technology partner. The question is how much of its AI system it can truly own.
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