Rupesh Srivastava, Hector Liu, and John Maggs at the Sunnyvale, California, lab.
Mike Kai Chen for Rest of World
The United Arab Emirates aims to become a global artificial intelligence powerhouse, and its latest investment is a new research lab in Silicon Valley.
The state-run Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, named after the president of the UAE, has opened a satellite lab in Sunnyvale, California, recruiting researchers from top U.S. universities and major tech firms to build AI models that rival American and Chinese systems.
The outpost is part of the UAE’s national AI strategy, under which the country is investing billions of dollars through G42, an all-purpose company led by its tech-savvy national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. MBZUAI, established only six years ago, aims to cultivate a local AI workforce as the “Stanford of the Middle East.”
