Ali Nimer, Chief Commercial Officer at Core42, explains that the company is building the AI infrastructure of the future for the MENA region through sovereign cloud, sector-specific solutions, and strategic partnerships—enabling secure, scalable, and responsible AI adoption.
What is Core42’s overarching strategy for driving AI adoption across the MENA region?
At Core42, we see AI adoption as a foundational lever for national progress. As the sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure arm of G42, our mission is to bring what we call the “Intelligence Grid” to life. Inspired by the evolution of electricity, we are building the infrastructure to distribute, access, and utilize artificial intelligence seamlessly just as the first electrical systems had generation, distribution, and regulation, we’re building the foundational stack for AI.
This strategy is anchored in three key pillars. First, we are delivering sovereign infrastructure by providing scalable compute power, sovereign public cloud platforms, and trusted data environments that meet the region’s highest standards for security, compliance, and performance. Second, we are developing sector-specific AI solutions designed to deliver measurable impact across priority industries such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and government. Third, we are committed to broadening access to innovation by offering enterprise-ready APIs through our Compass API platform, managed services, and AI tools that make advanced technologies usable and accessible for organizations at every maturity level.
To accelerate enterprise transformation, we also offer AI-associated professional services, migration accelerators, and AI-driven managed services that help clients modernize legacy systems, operationalize AI workloads, and minimize time-to-value. This ensures that our infrastructure and platforms are fully utilized to drive business outcomes.
By embedding data sovereignty into every layer of our stack, we empower governments and regulated sectors to adopt AI with full trust and control. Our comprehensive approach not only addresses the region’s data privacy and regulatory challenges but also aligns with the UAE’s broader ambition to lead the next wave of global AI innovation.
How is Core42 working with governments, enterprises, or startups to embed AI into critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, or logistics?
Core42 is actively enabling AI transformation across sectors that are critical to national resilience and economic diversification. Our approach is sector-specific and outcome-driven as we work as a strategic partner helping governments, enterprises, and startups embed AI into their core operations with speed, security, and scale.
In healthcare, we’re supporting the shift toward predictive diagnostics, genomics, and precision medicine. Through flagship projects and domain-specific AI models, we’re helping healthcare systems unlock real-time insights and drive smarter, more personalized care delivery. While, in finance, we’re accelerating the use of AI for fraud detection, compliance automation, and personalized banking. For example, we worked with First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) on cloud transformation to migrate operations to Microsoft Azure while ensuring full data sovereignty through our proprietary sovereign controls platform, Insight.
We are also powering smart government by partnering with public sector entities such as the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi to establish sovereign cloud infrastructure. This enhances the efficiency and innovation in citizen services while ensuring AI adoption aligns with framework for safety, security, and responsible development. This partnership exemplifies the UAE’s leadership in building globally significant, future-facing AI alliances, with Core42 at the center of implementation.
Our industry-tailored offerings are powered by a full-stack AI ecosystem, featuring globally distributed GPUs, AI-optimized storage, and heterogeneous compute infrastructure. Supporting this is our suite of AI-driven managed services and migration frameworks, which simplify deployment and enable clients to rapidly transition to AI-native operations. These services abstract the technical complexity, allowing organizations to focus on measurable outcomes while ensuring alignment with sector-specific compliance requirements.
Whether it’s co-creating with startups, scaling with enterprises, or modernizing public systems, Core42 delivers AI where it matters – responsibly, securely, and at scale.
What are the key challenges facing AI adoption in MENA and how is Core42 helping to overcome them?
One of the primary challenges in the MENA region is the lack of localized infrastructure and data frameworks that meet regional regulatory and operational needs. Another is the talent gap, especially in deep AI research, model deployment, and responsible AI governance. At Core42, we’re addressing these challenges by localizing AI at every layer: from sovereign cloud offerings and deploying AI infrastructure to enterprise-ready APIs and scalable platforms that simplify deployment while ensuring compliance.
We’re also tackling the talent gap through strategic workforce development initiatives. Our AI-powered tools are reshaping HR by enabling data-driven candidate matching, skills-based hiring, and predictive workforce analytics, ensuring the right talent is placed efficiently and fairly. Beyond hiring, Core42 uses AI to personalize employee learning and development journeys, aligning training programs with individual career goals. Sentiment analysis tools offer insights into engagement and well-being, allowing us to proactively foster a positive workplace culture. We conduct regular bias audits, use diverse training datasets, and maintain continuous human oversight to ensure our models remain transparent, fair, and accountable.
By embedding AI across infrastructure, operations, and workforce development, Core42 is helping enterprises adopt AI responsibly and shaping the future of an inclusive and sovereign AI economy in the MENA region.
What role do strategic partnerships play in Core42’s AI expansion across the MENA region, and how are you leveraging them to scale adoption?
Strategic partnerships are the backbone of Core42’s AI expansion – not just in MENA, but globally. We don’t approach AI as a standalone capability; we see it as a collaborative movement that requires shared infrastructure, aligned governance, and co-developed innovation.
Our landmark collaboration with Microsoft and G42, announced in April 2025, exemplifies this approach. The $1 billion investment in the global hyperscale data center in Abu Dhabi is a key milestone in the UAE’s digital evolution. It also establishes secure, sovereign cloud services powered by Microsoft Azure through Core42’s infrastructure. What sets this apart is not just the scale of investment, but the alignment on responsible AI development, security, and data sovereignty which are future-facing with Core42 at the center of implementation.
Through our Regulated Technology Environment (RTE) and sovereign-by-design architecture, we embed these global collaborations within a framework that respects both UAE regulatory priorities and international compliance standards. This ensures that our partnerships – whether with Microsoft, AMD, NVIDIA, Oracle, Cerebras, or others can drive innovation without compromising on control, governance, or geopolitical stability.
By integrating world-class technologies into regionally controlled data environments, Core42 enables faster AI adoption across industries – from smart government and digital banking to genomics and predictive logistics. These partnerships allow us to scale faster, adapt more intelligently, and bring advanced AI to the edge – where real-world problems exist.
How is Core42 addressing the need for AI talent and skill development across local markets?
At Core42, we recognize that driving AI adoption at scale begins with building talent capacity not just within our organization, but across the entire ecosystem. We are not only engineering AI solutions; we are helping build a sustainable AI economy, and that requires investing in people.
We take a multi-dimensional approach to talent development. Through close collaboration with universities, national training programs, and global upskilling initiatives, we are helping shape the next generation of AI practitioners, infrastructure engineers, cloud specialists, and digital policy leaders. We also embed talent-building components directly into our client engagements, ensuring that local teams are upskilled as part of project delivery.
Internally, we are deeply committed to fostering a high-performing, diverse workforce. We leverage AI-driven sourcing tools and market intelligence to identify top talent from thriving tech ecosystems around the world, while reinforcing our position as an employer of choice in the UAE. But hiring is just one part of the equation. Core42 invests heavily in ongoing development through technical and leadership training, internal mobility, curated mentorship programs, and milestone-based learning journeys that support career progression. We also prioritize UAE national development through dedicated initiatives that nurture homegrown talent into future technology leaders.
Finally, our use of AI in recruitment reflects our broader ethos of responsible AI. We combine intelligent screening tools with human oversight to streamline hiring while upholding fairness, cultural alignment, and ethical standards. By pairing AI enablement with human development, we are cultivating a workforce ready to lead in a sovereign, AI-first future.
How does Core42 ensure ethical, transparent, and responsible use of AI technologies in MENA markets?
At Core42, responsible AI is embedded into every layer of our technology, operations, and governance. As a sovereign AI leader, we are deeply committed to advancing innovation that is transparent, accountable, and aligned with societal values.
We welcome the growing global focus on AI safety, driven by the emergence of frontier models, and actively participate in shaping the regulatory frameworks that will define the next era of trusted AI. This includes contributing to policies around model evaluation and testing, the safe deployment of AI in regulated industries, and the development of cross-border compliance frameworks that protect both data and people.
Internally, we uphold a strong culture of ethical data use, reinforced by our parent company G42’s commitment to trust, transparency, and compliance. Through Responsible AI Centers and robust internal frameworks, we ensure that data is handled securely and transparently across applications – from healthcare and finance to smart government and infrastructure.
Core42 is also helping define a regional model for AI governance – one that could serve as a blueprint for other emerging digital economies. Our frameworks prioritize explainability, privacy, and control, especially for governments and sectors handling sensitive data such as healthcare and finance. By embedding ethical principles into every layer of our operations, we foster trust not only among our partners and customers but also across the broader AI ecosystem.
In essence, our approach to responsible AI is anchored in transparency, backed by compliance, and designed to scale safely in a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.