In June, G42 opened a London office and has made AI investment pledges across Asia, Africa, and the US
In sum – what you need to know:
G42 taps European compute – Abu Dhabi’s Core42 is close to securing access to nearly half of Northern Data’s 23,000 Nvidia GPUs to power its AI cloud expansion in Europe.
Northern Data pivots to AI – Once crypto-focused, the firm expects Taiga Cloud revenues to grow 74% this year as it rides rising AI demand.
UAE doubles down on AI – G42’s move follows major investment pledges across Europe, including a €50B French data center plan and a mega campus project with Nvidia.
UAE-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology holding company G42 is close to finalizing a deal with German company Northern Data with the aim of securing a major share of its Nvidia-powered compute capacity, according to a Bloomberg report, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
Under the proposed agreement, G42’s cloud arm, Core42, would gain access to nearly half of Northern Data’s 23,000 Nvidia GPUs. While terms are still being finalized, the deal signals G42’s accelerating push into Europe’s AI infrastructure space.
Northern Data, which once focused on crypto-mining customers, now operates data centers in the U.S., Sweden, Norway, and Portugal. Its Taiga Cloud unit, which offers generative AI services, expects revenues to grow by as much as 74% in 2025.
The UAE-based data center company has been actively expanding its global presence. In June, the firm opened a London office and has made AI investment pledges across Asia, Africa, and the U.S. The UAE-backed firm has also aligned with global partners to drive AI infrastructure investments, bringing deep financial backing tied to the country’s oil wealth.
Recent European initiatives include a joint effort with Nvidia, Mubadala, and MGX to build what could become Europe’s largest AI data center campus. G42 is also backing multibillion-euro plans for data center growth in France and Italy.
Earlier this year, U.S. software giant Microsoft had announced an investment of $1.5 billion in G42.
The investment will strengthen the two companies’ collaboration on bringing the latest Microsoft AI technologies and skilling initiatives to the UAE and other countries around the world.
Under this expanded collaboration, the Arab data centr firm will run its AI applications and services on Microsoft Azure and partner to deliver advanced AI solutions to global public sector clients and large enterprises. The pair will also work together to bring advanced AI and digital infrastructure to countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.
Microsoft also said that the partnership with the Arab company will support the development of a skilled and diverse AI workforce and talent pool that will drive innovation and competitiveness for the UAE and broader region.
Microsoft explained that the commercial partnership is backed by assurances to both governments through what the company said is a first of its kind agreement to apply world-class best practices to ensure the secure, trusted and responsible development and deployment of AI. Both companies will move forward with a commitment to comply with U.S. and international trade, security, responsible AI and business integrity laws and regulations.
In April 2023 both companies announced the development of AI solutions tailored for the public sector and industry, leveraging Microsoft’s extensive partner ecosystem and cloud capabilities. In September 2023, the companies entered into an agreement to introduce sovereign cloud offerings and collaborate on unlocking the potential of advanced AI capabilities on the Azure public cloud platform. Lastly, in November 2023, Microsoft announced the availability of G42’s Jais Arabic Large Language Model on the new Azure AI Cloud Model-as-a-Service offering.
