Mubadala attracts Together AI to Abu Dhabi: a sovereign bet on breaking the inference computing bottleneck
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Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund that manages an asset portfolio worth $385 billion across six continents, announced a strategic partnership with the US company Together AI, which specializes in accelerated computing platforms, inference and artificial intelligence models. The partnership aims to explore and identify joint investment opportunities in the AI ecosystem infrastructure within the United Arab Emirates, to support the development and deployment of advanced technologies in the second-largest economy in the Arab world.
The partnership includes establishing an official presence and office for Together AI in Abu Dhabi, enabling its AI research and inference computing capabilities to be close to and accessible for developers and companies building smart applications in the UAE and the broader region. The company, founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, has established itself as an advanced platform for inference, model fine-tuning and accelerated processing, allowing developers and enterprises to build and run applications using open-source and custom models.
The move follows Mubadala's previous participation in the Series C financing round that Together AI closed last July for $100 million, with a group of global technology and financial investors. The alliance reflects Mubadala’s growing focus within its domestic investment platform on attracting leading technology firms, deepening capabilities and providing an environment that moves innovation from theoretical research to practical applications in operational reality, as well as expanding access to advanced computing infrastructure.
Global demand for open-source AI models outpaces available computing capacity to run themThat is how Vinod Vid Brakash, founder and CEO of Together AI, summed up the motives for expanding to Abu Dhabi, explaining that global infrastructure expansion requires a distinctive partner like Mubadala that can provide capital and accelerate construction. For his part, Ali Al-Mahiri, executive director of diversified assets at the Emirates Investment Platform under Mubadala, said the collaboration directly strengthens a vital pillar of the local AI ecosystem and opens opportunities to leverage advanced infrastructure for various sectors.
The move falls within the objectives of the UAE National AI Strategy 2031, which aims to cement the country’s position as an international innovation hub by integrating advanced solutions into government operations and the business community. The partnership aligns with a series of large-scale initiatives and investments in the sector, including collaborations with Microsoft, NVIDIA and OpenAI, as well as the UAE-US cooperation to develop an AI complex with computing capacity of up to 5 gigawatts for data centres in Abu Dhabi, reflecting the emirate’s drive to build sovereign capabilities across the entire technology value chain, from energy and infrastructure to the inference layer and models.
What actually changes for developers and tech teams in the Gulf regionIt addresses the cost and latency challenge of running AI models. Having a local inference infrastructure owned by a specialised platform means engineers and organisations will no longer need to send open-source model queries to distant servers in North America or Europe, directly reducing latency and computing cost per call. If you lead a technical team building banking or health solutions that require real-time processing and sovereign data storage, the proximity of the inference layer turns the use of open models from an expensive operational burden into a competitive engineering option that lowers reliance on costly proprietary APIs.
Competition in the regional cloud computing market enters a phase of precise specialization in the inference layerThe battle is no longer limited to providing generic cloud storage or owning chips. The alliance between sovereign capital and open-compute acceleration platforms gives the Gulf business ecosystem strategic technical flexibility, and offers digital product developers in Egypt and the Levant a regional infrastructure capable of serving millions of users at lower inference cost, making investment in mastering model fine-tuning and local adaptation the most sought-after skill in the upcoming phase.