Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion in a technology company based in the United Arab Emirates and overseen by the country’s powerful national security adviser.
Microsoft and technology holding company G42 announced the deal on Tuesday. As part of the agreement, Microsoft President Brad Smith will join G42’s board of directors.
The deal “was developed in close consultation with both the UAE and US governments,” Microsoft said.
Abu Dhabi-based G42 operates data centers in the Middle East and elsewhere and has increasingly identified itself as an AI company. It has built what is considered the world’s leading Arabic-language AI model, known as Jais.
Microsoft said G42 will run its AI applications and services on the US tech giant’s cloud computing platform, and the two companies will work to bring digital infrastructure to countries where G42 has a presence in the Middle East, Central -Asia and Africa.
G42 has previously said it would cut ties with Chinese hardware suppliers over US concerns that it was too close to the Chinese government, seemingly leaving it to share its fate with the US in the burgeoning technology war with China. “We cannot work with both sides,” G42 CEO Peng Xiao said in December.
The company has faced accusations of espionage due to ties to a mobile phone app identified as spyware. The country also faced claims that it could have secretly collected genetic material from Americans for the Chinese government.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, is chairman of the company’s board of directors.