UAE’s AI Uuniversity aims to become Stanford of the Gulf

A few weeks before US President Donald Trump announced plans to lift semiconductor restrictions on the United Arab Emirates, a move with the potential to supercharge the region’s AI development, Eric Xing sat in his office in Abu Dhabi and discussed what the future might look like.

Mr Xing, a computer scientist who previously taught at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, is president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI, a six-year-old institution uniquely positioned to shape the coming AI boom.

During an interview with Bloomberg, Mr Xing repeatedly mentioned his ambition of making MBZUAI the Stanford of the Gulf, pointing to the California school’s role in nurturing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship whose effects have rippled far beyond Silicon Valley.  

The UAE is on a mission to become a global player in AI. The country appointed the world’s first AI minister back in 2017, and mandated this month that all primary schools add AI-based topics like algorithmic bias and prompt engineering to their curriculums.

With MBZUAI, named after the UAE leader, it is taking things further: the school is aiming to be a feeder for Emirati companies, which now mostly hire engineers from abroad; an incubator for homegrown startups; and an AI research and development arm for the UAE.

While the UAE has poured billions into building AI, MBZUAI wants to make the country less dependent on foreign talent and companies. Its role, in Mr Xing’s words, is “train the people who can carry out the work”.

Mr Trump may have just given the school a leg up in these ambitions. 

On his recent trip to the region, the US president framed a potential “US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership” as a way to strengthen business ties between the two countries, and to solidify the US lead in the field.

Under the terms of the agreement, the UAE would be allowed to import 500,000 of the most advanced chips every year between now and 2027, with a fifth set aside for G42, the country’s all-purpose AI company.

That’s a notable break with previous US strategy, said Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC.

Over the past two decades, as the country has strengthened its ties with China, US administrations responded by restricting UAE access to semiconductors and sensitive technologies.

Last year, G42 agreed to divest from China upon entering a partnership with Microsoft. By contrast, this latest proposal does not demand any Emirati concessions on ties with China.

Ms Diwan described that as “a massive win for the UAE’s ambitions to become a central hub in the global tech economy”. 

Just under a fifth of the nearly 400 graduate students at MBZUAI come from the Emirates. The rest mostly hail from China, India, Kazakhstan and Egypt, which increasingly have trouble sending students to study in the US and UK.

Backed by full scholarships from the UAE, MBZUAI students can pursue degrees in robotics, computer vision and other fields, with programs in decision science and digital public health launching soon.

So far, the school has granted 211 master’s degrees and eight doctorates and will welcome its first undergraduate class in the fall. This week, it opened its first US outpost: a research lab in Sunnyvale, near Google’s headquarters, focused on advanced AI foundation models. 

Designed by British architect Norman Foster, the MBZUAI campus is new, sleek and expensive, with students zipping around on electric golf carts and gathering at cafes and communal prayer rooms.

Ikboljon Sobirov, a graduate from Uzbekistan, said the university offered “quite generous” academic and administrative support, including securing him a golden visa for long-term residency in the UAE.

Ariana Venegas, a former analytics manager at Uber in Costa Rica, chose to study computer vision at MBZUAI over programs in Europe and Canada, where financial support was less certain.

“I prefer something more stable,” she said. According to MBZUAI, up to 70 per cent of graduates stay in the country.

Many end up at G42, as well as TII, a government-funded research institute, and the Emirati defense company Edge.

MBZUAI is designed to prepare graduates for the tech workforce. Business accounting and product management classes are required alongside computer science coursework, and Provost Timothy Baldwin has been recruiting rank-and-file engineers from Silicon Valley companies as guest lecturers.

According to an internal presentation, MBZUAI hopes to add another 225 faculty members within the next five years.

To lure AI talent, the school offers pay packages that are “more favourable” than those at top-tier schools, said Elizabeth Churchill, who left Google last year to start the human-computer interaction department.

She mentioned MBZUAI’s interest in breaking with “dominant” English-language culture as a point of appeal. Two years ago, the institution debuted what it described as “the world’s most advanced Arabic large language model.” 

Michael Bronstein, the DeepMind Professor of AI at Oxford University, praised the academics that MBZUAI has attracted. He also noted, with admiration, how quickly the university was established, calling it “probably the best thing that can happen to the region.”

At the same time, despite all its resources and promise, there are steep challenges ahead.

Compared to 140-year-old Stanford, which has more than 17,000 students and 150 graduate programs, MBZUAI is building everything from scratch, doesn’t yet have name recognition, and is reliant on government funding that doesn’t come with any permanent guarantees. 

Some tech practitioners and scholars may also be reluctant to move to the UAE, where it is forbidden to criticise the country’s government or leaders and acts of dissent carry a minimum sentence of five years in prison.

That is not unique – China, for instance, enforces similar laws– but it does contradict the image that the UAE is trying to present to the world. 

The country “doesn’t invite criticism,” said Melissa Nisbett, a reader at King’s College London who studies cultural politics. “In fact, it clamps down on it.”

Moreover, she added, should research fall outside the boundaries of what’s seen as acceptable, that could lead to trouble. “You think of the world’s first AI university as something boundary-pushing and exploratory,” Ms Nisbett said.

So far, this hasn’t been an issue. Both Mr Baldwin and Ms Churchill described free expression as a “core value” of the school, rejecting the notion that censorship might be an problem. “This is a clean slate,” Mr Baldwin said of the MBZUAI approach.

“Are there boundaries?” Ms Churchill said from a roomy campus lounge arrayed, like many places in the country, with portraits of Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed and his late father, the UAE’s founder.

“Yes,” she said, “but there are everywhere.” BLOOMBERG