Today's Edition
By The Right Honourable Sir Conor Burns*
‘Really? Is it safe?’ That was the near universal response before each of my three visits to the UAE this year. I replied that I grew up in Belfast at the height of the Troubles and, anyway, there was more chance of being knocked down crossing New York’s 5th Avenue than coming to harm in the UAE.
My confidence came because I knew that for years the leadership had quietly been preparing and investing for precisely the circumstances that have played out. Yet there was another reason to come; true friends stand shoulder to shoulder when their friends are facing challenges. So as others left, I arrived.
I have been a friend of the Gulf for many years. I chaired the UK Parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Bahrain and later served as a UK trade minister with responsibility for trade negotiations with the Gulf Cooperation Council. But the UAE is the place I have spent the most time in. From my first visit I have felt at home. I’ve come as a politician, a private citizen and now for business and thought leadership.
The transformation over those years has been enormous. Physically the country has changed before our eyes. I passionately contend that another transformation is underway — one of global importance.
For most of modern history the attributes of powerful states have combined the same ingredients: population, territory, natural resources, industrial capacity and military strength. The international institutions and global councils of the twentieth century largely reflected that reality.
As UK Trade Policy Minister, I became convinced that the great opportunities for future growth lay increasingly in the new economies of the world: the GCC, South America, Asia and Africa. As I oversaw the UK-GCC negotiations I also became convinced that Britain should seek a Free Trade Agreement directly with the UAE. I still believe that today.
But technological developments are now torching the 20th century world order and the assumptions on which it rested.
Artificial intelligence is not simply another new industry. It has the potential to change the way economies produce, governments function, militaries operate, knowledge is created and ultimately how nations exercise power.
Herein lies a generational opportunity for the UAE to recalibrate her place in the global order.
The UAE I first came to know was predominantly viewed from outside through three lenses: energy, security and commerce. Many saw it as a place to seek investment and leave with a cheque. That UAE is as outdated as a dial-up modem.
Under President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE has been quietly assembling many of the assets that will determine influence in the next era: capital, technology, compute, connectivity, talent and relationships.
The question now is whether those assets can be translated into something larger: global influence.
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s historic achievement was to turn natural wealth into nationhood. He understood that oil was not itself the inheritance but the means to build one: institutions, infrastructure, education, stability and confidence.
His son has inherited that foundation and taken the country into a very different world.
Perhaps the next great Emirati transformation will be to turn economic and technological power into global diplomatic and geopolitical significance.
The scale of the UAE’s AI ambition is already apparent. Abu Dhabi is developing a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus, intended to be the largest such deployment outside the United States.
Stargate UAE is the first international deployment of OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure platform.
The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence aims to establish Abu Dhabi as a hub for the international AI community. Through MGX, G42 and other institutions, Abu Dhabi has also placed itself inside the global networks through which the AI age is being built.
At the centre of much of this sits His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
His responsibilities span national security, artificial intelligence, advanced technology and some of Abu Dhabi’s most important investment institutions. That unique blend speaks profoundly about how the UAE understands the emerging world.
Capital, technology and national security are no longer separate spheres. Increasingly, they are different expressions of national power.
Here the UAE has advantages others will find nearly impossible to replicate. It can move. It can invest with patience, build infrastructure at extraordinary speed and attract talent internationally.
Perhaps most importantly, it can maintain relationships across geopolitical dividing lines that increasingly constrain traditional powers. The last bit matters. In an increasingly divided world, the ability to speak to everyone is itself a strategic asset.
The UAE has relationships with Washington and Beijing, with Europe and India, and across the Global South.
This is where technology and diplomacy intersect.
Imagine Abu Dhabi not simply as one of the world’s great centres of AI investment, but as one of the places where the world comes to discuss the consequences of AI.
That is a prize I see within reach: a permanent intellectual and diplomatic forum bringing together heads of government, technology leaders, investors, universities and thinkers to consider the questions every nation must confront.
Who controls the infrastructure on which artificial intelligence depends?
How can countries retain sovereignty when technological dependence may matter as much as energy dependence once did?
How do we ensure the benefits of AI reach developing nations rather than widening the divide between those possessing compute, capital and talent and those without?
These are not merely technical questions. They are questions of political leadership.
The UAE could help lead that conversation. Indeed, it may be unusually qualified to do so.
America and China will inevitably be viewed through the prism of strategic competition. The US asks, ‘How quickly can we deploy?’ The EU asks, ‘How much can we regulate?’ The UAE is in a different place.
It is technologically ambitious without aspiring to technological hegemony. It possesses substantial capital without requiring others to adopt an Emirati political model. It is deeply connected to the West while maintaining productive relationships across Asia and the Global South.
That makes it capable not only of participating in the emerging AI order, but of helping to convene it.
With a population of eleven million that may sound like an audacious ambition, but that is precisely the point: in the age of intelligence, population may cease to be the reliable proxy for power it once was.
A country’s influence may increasingly depend upon the intelligence it can harness, the infrastructure it can build, the capital it can deploy, the talent it can attract and the trust it can command.
On those measures, the UAE already competes far above its demographic weight.
Sheikh Zayed showed what could be achieved by converting natural resources into national capability. President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed now has an opportunity to oversee another transformation: to convert national capability into enduring global influence.
The twentieth century belonged disproportionately to the largest nations.
The twenty-first may belong to the most connected, the most agile and the most intelligent.
If that proves true, the UAE’s greatest chapter may still lie ahead. That is one of the reasons why, with elected politics behind me, I want to spend so much more of my life in the UAE and be part of this exhilarating journey.
*Sir Conor served as a Member of the Parliament and the United Kingdom’s Minister of State for International Trade.
