Abu Dhabi discovered another kind of power

Abu Dhabi discovered another kind of power. In 2006 an Emirati company was forced out of American port terminals by a congressional revolt. Twenty years later two Abu Dhabi firms have been granted licence-free access to the most controlled technology the United States produces, on condition that they become American companies within a year. Something changed, and it was not only the money. On 10 July the United States Bureau of Industry and Security removed the United Arab Emirates from the export control groups covering chemical, biological and missile technology and added it to Country Group A:5, a group containing many NATO members and close American technology partners. The UAE is the first Arab state to hold that status. The detail is more revealing than the headline. BIS kept the licence requirement for advanced computing items going to the UAE and then carved out exceptions for named recipients. Government agencies qualify, though the approval explicitly excludes state-owned corporations. Eight American companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Oracle, qualify along with their Emirati subsidiaries. Exactly two UAE-based firms appear on the list, G42 and Core42, and their authorisation carries a footnote: it expires automatically on 6 April 2027, and if the two companies have not become American companies by that date they must reapply. MGX, the emirate's $49 billion AI fund, received something less again, a statement that BIS intends to look favourably on its licence applications. Twenty years earlier, DP World acquired the British firm P&O and with it the management of terminal operations at six American ports. The administration approved the deal, Congress rebelled, and the House Appropriations Committee voted 62 to 2 in March 2006 to block the transfer. DP World gave up the American terminals the following day. The comparison is imperfect in a way that matters. DP World is a Dubai company, and the strategy that followed has been driven from Abu Dhabi. Washington saw both through a single lens, as assets controlled from the UAE, but the two emirates drew different lessons. Dubai discovered the limits of straightforward sovereign ownership of strategic infrastructure. Abu Dhabi built something more oblique. A network, rather than a fund Abu Dhabi's three main sovereign funds are estimated to manage around $1.7 trillion between them, with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority holding roughly $1.1 trillion on external estimates, since ADIA does not publish the figure. That pool behaved for years exactly as the 2006 experience suggested it should: diversified, passive, spread across dozens of countries and deliberately unobtrusive. What has changed is the number of institutions moving in the same direction, rather than the size of the money. MGX, founded in March 2024 with Mubadala and the AI group G42 as anchor backers, closed its first fund at $49 billion on 1 July against a $45 billion target. In five months it co-led Anthropic's $30 billion round in February, co-led OpenAI's $122 billion round in March, joined xAI's $20 billion raise in January and returned for Anthropic's $65 billion round in May. It holds fifteen per cent of TikTok's American joint venture alongside Oracle and Silver Lake, and it participated in the consortium with BlackRock's infrastructure arm that bought Aligned Data Centers in a deal valued at around $40 billion. Around it sit the others. Mubadala created GlobalFoundries in 2009 and remains its controlling shareholder, which gives Abu Dhabi a position in semiconductor manufacturing that predates the current wave by fifteen years. G42 built the stake in Cerebras that drew American national security scrutiny, and it is G42 and its subsidiary Core42 that appear on the BIS approved list. Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan chairs MGX, controls G42, serves as the UAE's national security adviser and is a brother of the president. That last sentence is the mechanism. A large institutional investor can buy the same shares, and several do. What it cannot do is combine an equity position with defence procurement, intelligence cooperation, export-control negotiation and head-of-state diplomacy, run by people who report to each other. Buying into the ground The second move is harder to reverse than a shareholding. The UAE-US AI Acceleration Partnership, signed during the American president's visit in May 2025, provided for a five-gigawatt technology campus in Abu Dhabi across roughly ten square miles. Inside it, G42's data centre subsidiary Khazna is building Stargate UAE, a one-gigawatt compute cluster for OpenAI with Oracle, Cisco, Nvidia and SoftBank, an initial 200-megawatt phase targeted for this year. Its promoters make the commercial case in terms of geography, since the site sits within reach of about half the world's population. The strategic effect is to place a significant piece of American-led AI infrastructure on Emirati land, powered by Emirati electricity and built by an Emirati company, creating a mutual exposure that selling a stake would not undo. The chips deployed there run under a compliance regime G42 calls the Regulated Technology Environment, designed with American input and approved on the American side, and BIS maintains an export control officer presence in the country. Both governments have accepted entanglement they would previously have avoided. What the money did not buy The honest reading of July's decision is that capital was not the decisive factor. The rule sets out its own reasoning. BIS points to decades of joint work against Iran and its proxies, the designation of the UAE as a Major Defense Partner in September 2024, the country's role in Operation Epic Fury, its position as the largest American trading partner in the Middle East, and the May 2025 technology agreement. It notes Emirati direct investment in the United States valued at over $1 trillion. Money appears in that list as one item among several, and the security cooperation runs back much further than the investment does. Twenty years of embassy work, military interoperability and the Abraham Accords did at least as much as any cheque. Money did not buy the upgrade. It made the country worth upgrading, which is a smaller and more precise claim. The leverage also runs in both directions, and the April 2027 condition shows which direction runs harder. Abu Dhabi's flagship AI companies hold their access on the understanding that they will become American companies. The American firms on the same list hold theirs unconditionally. The compute is American, the chips are American, the models are American, the compliance framework was approved in Washington, and the classification that permits any of it can be amended by the agency that granted it. Usefulness is a weaker position than it looks when the other side owns the technology. There is a further objection, which is that the DP World comparison flatters the present. Port terminals are territory. Minority stakes in private laboratories are not, and a state that has spent twenty years learning which American assets it is permitted to hold may simply have found the ones nobody will fight over. That would make this adaptation rather than triumph. The route in What has genuinely changed is where these decisions get taken. In 2006 the question of Emirati control of American infrastructure was settled in public, by a recorded committee vote, in a form voters could see and punish. The 2026 equivalents are private funding rounds, a bilateral framework and a six-page amendment to the Export Administration Regulations that took effect four days before it was published. Congressional scrutiny exists, though much of it has concentrated on whether the president's family profited from Emirati-linked crypto transactions rather than on the structure of the relationship, and that focus is itself revealing about what American politics currently finds legible. On the other side the position is starker. The UAE has a Federal National Council, half appointed and half chosen through a restricted franchise, which reviews legislation and questions ministers. It is not an equivalent of Congress and could not vote 62 to 2 to kill an arrangement, and there is no competitive national election through which voters could replace the people responsible for one. This is the tension the whole episode turns on. Abu Dhabi can move capital, security policy and industrial strategy together because very few people need to agree, and that speed is precisely what has made it valuable to Washington. The American system produced a humiliating reversal in 2006, and that mess was democratic accountability functioning in plain view. Twenty years on, the speed looks enviable and the mess looks expensive. Whichever of the two proves more durable, the campus in the desert will still be there, and the classification that allows it to run can be withdrawn on a Friday afternoon. Disclosure: McCyber uses AI tools from several of the companies named in this essay, including Anthropic, in which MGX holds an investment. See About. Sources: US Bureau of Industry and Security, 91 FR 43034; G42; MGX; CNBC; Financial Times; Wall Street Journal; UAE Government; US congressional records.