Mubadala and Together AI partner on UAE AI infrastructure push
Mubadala Investment Company and Together AI have announced a strategic partnership to develop artificial intelligence infrastructure in the UAE, with the San Francisco-based platform committing to establish a local presence in Abu Dhabi. The move follows Mubadala's $100 million participation in Together AI's Series C financing round, which closed on 1 July 2026 alongside a group of global technology and financial investors.
The partnership is structured around identifying opportunities across the AI value chain in the UAE, spanning inference capacity, open-source model deployment and the developer ecosystem. Together AI's Abu Dhabi office is intended to bring its compute infrastructure physically closer to regional demand, rather than relying on transatlantic or intercontinental routing for latency-sensitive workloads.
The deal
Together AI positions itself as a full-stack AI platform for inference, model training and accelerated compute, with a particular emphasis on open-source models. Founder and chief executive Vipul Ved Prakash framed the rationale in supply-side terms: "The demand for open-source AI is outpacing the compute available to serve it. Developers want open models because they can own, shape and deploy them however they want, but that only works if the infrastructure underneath is fast, efficient, and actually there when you need it."
Ali Eid AlMheiri, Executive Director of the UAE Investments Platform at Mubadala, said the collaboration would deepen access to AI infrastructure and support the emirate's broader ambition to move innovation from research into real-world application.
Neither party disclosed the financial terms of the strategic partnership itself, which is separate from the Series C equity stake. The release did not specify the number of staff Together AI plans to hire in Abu Dhabi, the compute capacity it intends to deploy, or which hyperscaler or co-location partner it will use for UAE data-centre access.
Market context
The UAE has emerged as one of the most active sovereign markets for AI infrastructure investment, driven by Abu Dhabi's ambition to diversify its economy beyond hydrocarbons. Mubadala, which manages a portfolio valued at approximately $385 billion, has been a consistent backer of technology infrastructure globally, with positions across semiconductors, cloud and AI alongside its Together AI stake.
Together AI competes in a crowded managed-inference and open-model-platform market. Its direct peers include Fireworks AI, Anyscale and Replicate, while hyperscalers offer competing managed inference via AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Studio and Google Vertex AI. The open-source angle is a meaningful differentiator for enterprise buyers who want model portability and data-residency control, particularly in markets where sovereign AI policy is explicit government priority.
The UAE's AI regulatory posture is currently permissive relative to the EU, with no equivalent to the EU AI Act in force. That regulatory headroom, combined with Mubadala's balance sheet and existing technology-sector relationships, makes the market attractive for infrastructure providers seeking to scale outside Western jurisdictions that face tighter compliance burdens. US export-control rules on advanced AI chips (governed by the Bureau of Industry and Security) remain a potential constraint on the GPU hardware Together AI can deploy in the region, and the partnership's technical scope will depend in part on how those rules evolve.
Together AI, founded in 2022, says it serves more than one million developers. The Abu Dhabi office and the broader regional infrastructure build-out will be watched as an early test of whether sovereign investment can meaningfully accelerate open-model adoption in markets where hyperscaler coverage has historically been thinner.