UAE’s G42 Gears Up to Launch 8 Exaflop AI Supercomputer in India

The partnership also includes American semiconductor company Cerebras Systems, India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). This initiative was unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi and represents a strategic push to enhance domestic AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale.

At its core, the project aims to provide India with state-of-the-art computational capacity, measured at 8 exaflops, which far surpasses typical AI computing systems and introduces exaflop-scale performance into India’s research and development ecosystem. An exaflop, as a performance metric, denotes a system capable of at least 10¹⁸ calculations per second and is widely recognized as a benchmark for next-generation supercomputing.

The system will be hosted entirely within India, operate under India’s national governance and compliance frameworks, and maintain full data residency within the country’s jurisdiction, a crucial consideration for sovereignty, security, and regulatory compliance across sensitive sectors.

A Sovereign Asset for Broad Access

Unlike many commercial computing projects that serve a limited set of enterprise customers, the new supercomputer is designed as a shared national resource. India plans to make access available not just to premier research institutions and government ministries, but also to startups, small and medium enterprises and a broader ecosystem of innovators seeking high-end AI compute. By lowering barriers to access, the system could catalyze innovation across fields that demand intensive computation, such as healthcare diagnostics, agricultural optimization, climate modeling, natural language systems and language-specific AI tools.

Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, emphasized the strategic importance of the initiative, stating, "Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness. This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security."

The collaboration also signals a deepening of ties between India and the UAE on technological fronts. The project follows engagements such as the India-UAE Strategic Dialogue and high-level visits by UAE leadership to New Delhi earlier this year, which reinforced commitments across defense, technology, energy and space exploration.

Partnership With Cerebras and Research Institutions

Cerebras Systems, an American AI hardware innovator known for its wafer-scale systems designed specifically for large-scale deep learning workloads, is contributing technology and engineering expertise to the project. Its systems have previously been deployed in the U.S. and are optimized for high-performance AI training and inference.

Richard Morton, Executive Director of the Institute of Foundation Models at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, highlighted the academic and societal impact of the initiative, saying, "MBZUAI is committed to advancing AI research and education that addresses real-world challenges. This collaboration with India represents a shared commitment to expanding access to advanced AI compute for researchers and students, enabling breakthroughs in critical areas like healthcare, agriculture and education."

Andy Hock, Chief Strategy Officer at Cerebras, pointed to the company’s prior deployments and the broader significance of the India project, stating, "Cerebras and G42 have already successfully delivered Condor Galaxy supercomputers in the United States, demonstrating how our technology is purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads at scale. Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs."

Why Compute Power Matters

The leap to exaflop-scale computing is more than a technical milestone, it is foundational to the next generation of AI research. Traditional machine learning and AI development workflows often involve massive amounts of data and complex model architectures that require high throughput and low latency for both training and inference. Systems capable of 8 exaflops dramatically shorten the time required to train large language models, generative models and multi-modal networks, which can otherwise take weeks on smaller clusters.

At the national level, this scale of compute enables experimentation, optimization, and the scaling of advanced algorithms that may previously have been out of reach due to computational limits. It also strengthens India’s ability to retain and manage critical AI pipelines domestically instead of depending on foreign cloud providers for high-end compute, an important consideration in ongoing discussions around data sovereignty and digital autonomy.

In recent years, India has signaled its intent to become a central player in AI development. Beyond this project, global tech giants and domestic conglomerates alike have outlined plans to expand cloud infrastructure and AI services in the country, contributing billions of dollars in investment and solidifying the region’s role as a hub for next-generation digital innovation.