Partly True
The United Arab Emirates has revised the site plan for its flagship 5-gigawatt AI data center project, spreading facilities across multiple locations as a hedge against regional security threats, Reuters reported on September 11, 2026, citing unnamed sources. The reported dispersal has not been confirmed by any government or corporate party to the project, leaving the campus itself โ and the May 2025 unveiling of its first phase, attended by the UAE and U.S. presidents โ as the only officially documented elements.
The U.S. Department of Commerce issued a press release in May 2025 stating that the UAE and U.S. presidents attended the unveiling of Phase 1 of a new 5GW AI campus in Abu Dhabi. That announcement is the sole on-the-record confirmation of the project's scale and the source of the "5GW" figure at the center of the claim under review.
Reuters reported that the UAE revised its AI data center plan following Iranian attacks, placing facilities across multiple sites rather than in a single location โ a change the report framed as a preemptive response to security risk. The attribution rests entirely on anonymous sourcing, and no UAE ministry, U.S. agency, or development partner has issued a statement corroborating the revision.
Both key documents proved difficult to access directly. The Reuters article was gated behind a DataDome challenge, and its archived snapshot captured the same challenge page, so the text was reviewed through a TBS News reprint of the piece. The Commerce Department release was blocked by a Cloudflare challenge and was read through the official mirror on the U.S. embassy site. In total, eight primary sources were reviewed for this assessment.
The claim therefore combines one verified fact โ a real 5GW AI campus with an officially attended Phase 1 unveiling โ with one sourced-but-unconfirmed element, the security-driven distributed layout, and on that balance the claim is Partly True.