Dubai
The first sovereign-AI city of the 2020s.
Kernel
Dubai (and Abu Dhabi adjacent to it) is the most successful 21st-century example of a state buying its way into the front rank of technology centers. Mubadala's G42, the country's $1.5T+ sovereign capital, the 2023–25 NVIDIA H100 procurement at scale, the active courtship of OpenAI, Anthropic, and academic AI institutes — Dubai is attempting to compress 30 years of Silicon-Valley-style hub formation into a decade by writing checks. It's too early to tell whether it works, but it is now too well-funded to ignore.
The strategy
Sovereign-AI as foreign-policy positioning. Compute as a strategic reserve. Education partnerships (MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi) that compress the talent-import cycle. Visas designed to make permanent residence trivial for the right researchers. A regulatory environment that competes with Singapore for U.S.-China neutrality but with cheaper energy and lower tax.