Innovation City, the UAE’s premier AI-powered free zone, and Siada, an IOPn enterprise, today launched the Middle East’s first sovereign AI data centre; live, operational, and ready inside Innovation City Ras Al Khaimah.
This is not a pilot. This is not a future promise. This is sovereign frontier AI infrastructure running now.
While the world’s biggest tech companies fight for NVIDIA B200 GPU allocation with waitlists stretching into 2027, Siada in partnership with Innovation City, has secured, installed and activated them. Every computation happens on UAE soil. Every byte of data stays under UAE jurisdiction. Full sovereignty, guaranteed.
Founders and enterprises inside Innovation City can access this power by the hour, reserve long-term capacity, or deploy fully managed on-premises environments where Siada runs their models in isolated, sovereign infrastructure from day one.
This is what sets Innovation City dramatically apart from every other free zone. We don’t just license companies, It removes the infrastructure barriers that slow AI businesses down. Together, Innovation City and Siada understand the brutal realities tech builders face: rationed compute, data residency risks, regulatory friction and ecosystems that treat AI as an afterthought.
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Innovation City’s AI companies get immediate access to the world’s most sought-after GPUs, wrapped in a purpose-built ecosystem designed specifically for them to win. Gaming studios building real-time AI experiences, fintech platforms running regulated workloads and AI-native founders now operate at the frontier – faster than anywhere else in the region.
“This partnership with Siada proves what makes Innovation City different,” said Paul Dawalibi, CEO of Innovation City. “We are not another free zone chasing the AI wave. We are leading it by deeply understanding the exact pain points of technology and AI companies – and solving them head-on with sovereign compute infrastructure that no one else delivers at this scale. If you are an AI company serious about building the future, this is the only ecosystem engineered to help you succeed at speed.”
“Sovereignty isn’t just about where data sits – it’s about who gets to decide,” said Mojtaba Asadian, CEO of IOPn. “IOPn was built from the ground up so that people, businesses, and governments retain genuine agency over their own data, identity, and intelligence; the right to choose their infrastructure, not have it chosen for them. Building Siada is not just a regional milestone. It is a blueprint for how sovereign AI should be built everywhere – infrastructure that hands control back to the people and institutions it serves, in step with the UAE’s vision for the future of data safeguarding.”
As GCC regulators tighten scrutiny on cross-border data flows, in-country sovereign compute is no longer optional – it’s table stakes. The leaders are already running on it today, inside Innovation City.
Sovereign AI in the Middle East now has a clear address: Innovation City, Ras Al Khaimah.
