At GITEX GLOBAL 2025, Core42 is highlighting its vital contribution to the development of sovereign cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure throughout the UAE and beyond. Serving as the digital infrastructure branch of the G42 ecosystem, Core42 plays a key role in realizing the group’s vision of the “Intelligence Grid”: establishing AI-native nations that seamlessly blend infrastructure, intelligence, and innovation.
In an exclusive discussion, Kiril Evtimov, the CEO of Core42, elaborates on the company’s new AI cloud services, the significance of digital sovereignty, and how Core42 is laying the groundwork for a secure and globally competitive AI landscape.
What are your highlights at GITEX GLOBAL 2025
We are thrilled to return to GITEX and exhibit the advancements we are making in promoting sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure across the UAE and beyond. This year, Core42 is positioned prominently within the G42 District in AI Hall 6, underscoring our role as the digital infrastructure arm of the G42 ecosystem. The vision of G42’s Intelligence Grid is transforming the way nations construct AI-native societies by integrating infrastructure, intelligence, and innovation into a singular cohesive framework. Alongside our sister companies, we are actualizing this vision, and at GITEX GLOBAL 2025, we are demonstrating how our offerings translate to real-world outcomes that enhance the UAE’s leadership in AI and establish new benchmarks for secure, globally competitive AI infrastructure.
A key feature of our participation is the launch of our AI Cloud offering, a high-performance sovereign platform that consolidates all leading accelerators in a single environment tailored for training, fine-tuning, and inference needs. We are also unveiling our Sovereign Public Cloud, the upcoming Signature Private Cloud, and our Compass generative AI platform, along with new partnerships set to enhance the UAE’s global leadership.
Overall, our presence at the event is aimed at showcasing our involvement in turning G42’s Intelligence Grid into reality and laying the groundwork for the next digital era.
Which emerging technologies are you concentrating on this year
This year, we are zeroing in on technologies that enable AI to be operational at scale. We are investing in the necessary infrastructure, platforms, and controls that transition AI from theoretical applications to enterprise capabilities. Through our AI Cloud, we provide customers with on-demand access to cutting-edge accelerators within a sovereign, high-performance setting. This allows for quicker training, fine-tuning, and inference while ensuring compliance and data integrity. Simultaneously, Compass, our generative AI platform, simplifies the accessibility of generative and agentic AI through a secure suite of APIs, empowering developers to innovate with confidence.
We are convinced that these technologies possess the potential to assist governments and enterprises in evolving from merely adopting AI tools to integrating intelligence into their foundational workflows. At Core42, our mission is to facilitate this transition by making advanced AI accessible, reliable, and impactful, ensuring that organizations build their digital futures on infrastructure that blends performance with sovereignty.
How is Core42 influencing the evolution of AI infrastructure and digital sovereignty
We believe that the future of AI hinges on sovereign infrastructure that effectively combines performance, trust, and accessibility. Nations and enterprises yearn to innovate with assurance, knowing that their data, models, and operations are under their governance. Core42 has demonstrated that sovereignty and scalability can coexist, a model that is now gaining global recognition as the standard for responsible AI implementation.
We are establishing this foundation across all layers of the stack. The Sovereign Public Cloud has already enabled over 50 public and private organizations to execute critical workloads securely within national borders, while the upcoming Signature Private Cloud will extend these capabilities to classified and heavily regulated environments.
Our AI Cloud integrates the world’s leading accelerators into one unified, sovereign platform for large-scale training and inference, and Compass opens doors to generative and agentic AI through secure APIs. Collectively, these technologies are pioneering a new category of sovereign infrastructure that fosters innovation, assures compliance, and provides nations and enterprises the confidence to lead in the AI era.
G42’s theme at GITEX this year is ‘Building AI-Native Nations.’ How is Core42 actualizing this vision in the UAE and beyond
Building AI-Native Nations encapsulates the UAE’s aspiration to forge an economy and society fundamentally rooted in AI. At Core42, we are working to realize this ambition by delivering the digital foundations required for its realization. Our function within the G42 ecosystem is to offer the sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure essential for governments and enterprises to scale innovation securely, responsibly, and with complete regulatory compliance. Through this foundation, we are embedding intelligence into public services, national systems, and industries that permeate daily life.
In the UAE, we are already making strides. Our Sovereign Public Cloud is facilitating the digital transformation of essential government entities, while the Signature Private Cloud extends its capabilities to the most sensitive and classified workloads. The AI Cloud and Compass platform enable the creation of secure, high-performance AI solutions across sectors like energy, healthcare, finance, and education.
Globally, we are pushing this model forward through partnerships that enhance sovereign AI capabilities in various regions. In France, we collaborated with AMD to establish a state-of-the-art AI data center in Grenoble, and partnered with Oréus to provide local access to scalable computational power. In Italy, we teamed up with iGenius to launch Europe’s largest AI compute cluster utilizing NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, marking a substantial advancement in sovereign AI infrastructure for the European market.
Moreover, we recently made OpenAI’s latest open-weight AI models available worldwide through our AI cloud platform, enabling enterprises, researchers, and developers to implement models across leading silicon platforms with sovereign, scalable, and high-performance capabilities. Additionally, we have entered into a strategic partnership with Northern Data Group to facilitate access to extensive European sovereign AI Cloud capacity, supported by up to 10,000 GPUs from its Taiga Cloud business, meeting the surging demand for high-performance computing.
These initiatives illustrate how we are turning the UAE’s AI objectives into concrete progress, from the infrastructure that fuels national systems to the tools that facilitate secure, scalable AI adoption. By making sovereign, high-performance computing and advanced AI capabilities readily available to governments and enterprises, we are assisting nations in transitioning from AI aspirations to tangible AI realities, ensuring that intelligence becomes a fundamental resource for each nation’s growth, resilience, and global competitiveness.
In essence, “Building AI-Native Nations” is not just a slogan for us; it is a framework we are actively implementing through Core42’s technologies, collaborations, and expertise.
As the AI race accelerates across regions and sectors, where do you identify the largest opportunities for Core42’s expansion and influence in the future
AI has emerged as the cornerstone of digital transformation, with the most significant opportunities present where nations and enterprises seek to scale it safely and responsibly. For Core42, this translates into developing three main areas—expanding sovereign cloud capabilities, enhancing AI infrastructure, and enabling operational AI across various sectors.
In the UAE, our priority is to strengthen ties with federal entities and strategic industries to accelerate the adoption of AI on a national scale. We are collaborating with government institutions and regulators to modernize core services, enhance data-driven decision-making, and weave intelligence into national platforms that elevate efficiency and citizen experiences.
Globally, we recognize a growing need for the UAE’s model of sovereign AI infrastructure. We are already cooperating with partners across Europe to implement this framework, assisting countries in establishing secure, high-performance AI ecosystems that balance innovation with sovereignty, compliance, and oversight. These partnerships extend beyond merely technology deployment. We are prioritizing knowledge transfer and capacity building to empower nations to create their own AI capabilities, enhance digital resilience, and emulate the UAE’s success in shaping a globally competitive, AI-driven economy.
Looking forward, the most promising opportunity lies in operationalizing AI, transitioning from pilot programs to platforms that drive economies, cities, and enterprises. With the collective capabilities of our AI Cloud, Sovereign Public Cloud, and upcoming Signature Private Cloud, along with our Managed Services support for our customers, Core42 is facilitating this transition, enabling nations and organizations to convert AI ambitions into genuine impact.