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UAE-Based G42 Partners On World’s Fastest AI Supercomputer
The machine, named Condor Galaxy, has been built to assist with generative AI projects and is over 20 times faster than its predecessor.
Condor Galaxy, the world’s “fastest AI training supercomputer”, has been built with assistance from G42, a UAE-based technology holding group. The machine is actually a network of nine interconnected AI supercomputers developed by US-based AI company Cerebras Systems.
Located in Santa Clara, California, the massive machine boasts 4 exaFLOPs of power and a staggering 54 million cores that will significantly reduce AI processing times.
G42 will use Condor Galaxy to train AI models across a variety of data sets and has already created and tested Arabic bilingual chat, healthcare, and climate study applications.
“Collaborating with Cerebras to rapidly deliver the world’s fastest AI training supercomputer and laying the foundation for interconnecting a constellation of these supercomputers across the world has been enormously exciting,” said Talal Alkaissi, CEO of G42 Cloud. “The partnership brings together Cerebras’ extraordinary compute capabilities, together with G42’s multi-industry AI expertise,” he added.
Training the latest AI models requires enormous computing power and specialized programming skills. ChatGPT, for example, relies on 175 billion parameters and uses 10,000 Nvidia GPUs to train its AI algorithms.
Condor Galaxy brings genuine innovation to these kinds of processes, as all computing is performed entirely without complex distributed programming languages. This means that large projects no longer require weeks or even months spent distributing work over thousands of GPUs.
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“Many cloud companies have announced massive GPU clusters that cost billions of dollars to build but are extremely difficult to use. Distributing a single model over thousands of tiny GPUs takes months from dozens of people with rare expertise,” noted Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras Systems. “CG-1 eliminates this challenge. Setting up a generative AI model takes minutes, not months, and can be done by a single person” he added.
The G42 and Cerebras partnership marks another step toward the democratization of AI. The combination of massive computing power and unique AI data sets should produce groundbreaking results and turbocharge hundreds of AI projects around the world.
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Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict
Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.
Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.
“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.
The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.
The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.
Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.
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The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.
So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.
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