Domestic artificial intelligence investment in the UAE exceeded Dh543 billion between 2024 and 2025, according to a PwC Middle East assessment of the country's competitive position, published under the title From AI momentum to AI returns. The report records that Stargate UAE is moving from plan to deployment, with the first 200 megawatts of its one-gigawatt compute cluster targeted for completion in 2026, as part of a wider five-gigawatt national AI infrastructure ambition. It credits homegrown institutions, including MGX, G42, e& and the Advanced Technology Research Council, with scaling sovereign cloud, foundation models and digital enterprise tools, and notes that the UAE's financial centres are bringing AI into regulatory frameworks and talent development.

Government, PwC finds, is moving beyond digital enablement towards AI embedded in how services are designed. The federal Agentic AI framework aims to move 50 per cent of government sectors, services and operations onto autonomous models within two years, supported by a capability-building programme for 80,000 federal employees. Abu Dhabi's 2025 to 2027 Digital Strategy, backed by Dh13 billion, aims to make the emirate the world's first fully AI-native government by 2027, with more than 100 AI use cases live and a pipeline of more than 200 in development, an agentic platform used in an Abu Dhabi Executive Council meeting, and chief data and AI officer roles established in every government entity. Dubai is extending the momentum into the private sector, with Dubai Chambers running specialised training tracks for more than 14,000 member companies through the Dubai Chambers Academy.

The report places the UAE first globally in Microsoft's Global AI Diffusion Report for the second quarter of 2026, with 73.3 per cent of the working-age population using AI, and PwC's own AI Jobs Barometer shows the share of UAE job postings requiring AI skills more than tripling between 2021 and 2025. PwC argues the next phase depends on translating that foundation into enterprise value through three shifts: redesigning end-to-end workflows rather than isolated tasks, pursuing growth and business model reinvention rather than efficiency alone, and building owned, repeatable scale with governance, under a federal framework that defines roles across ministries and a new national Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority that consolidates policy, data governance, standards and compliance.