UAE banks, insurers and fintechs are now operating alongside two separate sovereign cloud efforts built by the same company. The Central Bank of the UAE partnered with Core42 in February to build a sovereign financial cloud reserved for licensed institutions, and Core42 has now partnered with e& UAE on a second, open-market sovereign compute platform serving a much wider set of sectors.
What e& UAE and Core42 launched
this week, a GPU infrastructure platform giving organisations in-country access to AI compute they can use to build, train and deploy models without moving sensitive data outside the UAE. The offering combines Core42’s Sovereign AI Cloud with e& UAE’s connectivity network, and includes GPU Connect, a bundled service pairing GPU access with premium connectivity, alongside zero egress fees and no upfront capital expenditure.
Core42 supplies the AI accelerators and implementation work; e& UAE provides the carrier-grade connectivity linking enterprise environments to the infrastructure. The company lists government, healthcare, financial services, energy, education, retail, manufacturing, industrial operations and large enterprises as target sectors, with financial services one of nine, not the platform’s specific focus.
A mandate that predates it by five months
That broader platform arrives five months after , a cornerstone of the CBUAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation program built specifically for licensed financial institutions. The central bank’s version is described as the world’s first dedicated financial sovereign cloud ecosystem, built to keep customer and transaction data inside the UAE while giving banks and insurers access to AI-powered risk analytics and compliance automation under regulator-set controls.
Lawyers flag new accountability questions
, said the direction of travel is towards standardisation rather than case-by-case arrangements: “Data residency, supervisory access and resilience obligations are becoming increasingly operationalised and standardised.”
Jessica White, managing senior associate in financial regulation at Pinsent Masons, said the sovereign cloud model raises new accountability questions, requiring “clearer operational demarcation between institutions, vendors and supervisors during incidents,” and that international players in particular need to assess how their global cloud models line up against sovereign requirements on data localisation and AI-enabled systems.
What e& UAE and Core42 say
Esam Mahmoud, senior vice president of SMB sales and marketing at e& UAE, said: “AI is becoming a key part of how organisations operate. Through our collaboration with Core42, we are enabling UAE enterprises and government entities a simpler, faster and more secure way to access sovereign GPU infrastructure, connect their data and operationalise AI at scale.”
Jaafar Al Hashmi, vice president of government relations and market development at Core42, said the partnership “extends sovereign AI from foundational infrastructure into an operational capability, integrating compute, connectivity, and implementation into a single framework built for deployment.”
Neither company’s announcement addresses how the new e& UAE platform relates to the CBUAE’s own sovereign financial cloud mandate for licensed institutions, or whether a bank using the broader commercial platform would still satisfy the central bank’s specific data residency and supervisory requirements. For a UAE financial institution deciding where to run AI workloads, that is the open question the launch itself does not answer.
