Traditionally dependent on oil, the UAE has been diversifying into sectors such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Alghannam 2026), most notably through its National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031. Since 2024, it has invested $147 billion in AI (Arab Weekly 2025) to build an AI economy, but it lacks the talent to match its capital. India has the opposite problem. It accounts for an estimated 16% of the world’s AI talent base (India Skills Report 2026), yet many of its skilled professionals leave in search of better pay, frontier infrastructure, and permanent residency abroad. Over 2 lakh Indians have renounced their citizenship each year in recent years (TOI 2025). This article proposes a corridor that lets India’s talent use the UAE’s capital and compute without leaving India.

Mapping UAE & Indian Strategies for Artificial Intelligence

The UAE  treats oil as a transitional asset, using its revenues to build a post-oil economy in sectors such as tourism and AI (Younis 2026).  They aim to build an AI economy through large-scale (American-scale) investments in computing infrastructure, using a Chinese-style approach with state-backed entities such as G42. For this, they utilise sovereign wealth funds through state-backed ventures such as Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, etc., to channel investments into AI ( Priyanjana Bengani et al. 2025)

The strategy also aims to integrate AI across multiple sectors, such as government services and research and development (R&D), and to attract and train talent for AI-enabled jobs (National Program for Artificial Intelligence 2018). The UAE is one of the fastest-growing AI talent markets globally (PwC 2026), but meeting its targets requires a far larger pool of skilled professionals than it can train domestically. To do so, it must compete for international high-skilled talent, who often move to the West in search of better opportunities and permanent residency (Bose 2026). While the Golden Visa offers selected skilled professionals a renewable 10-year residency, it offers no route to permanent citizenship.

On the other hand, India’s AI strategy is characterised as cost-efficient and application-driven (Press Information  2026), similar to China’s.Yet, India lags behind China ($12.4 billion) and the United States ($285 billion) with $4.1 billion (Verity 2025) in terms of private investment. The Stanford Index Report 2026 reports that India has over 50,460 AI authors and inventors, second only to the United States. With Indian IT firms such as TCS, Infosys, etc., traditionally providing labour-intensive software services rather than owning the infrastructure (Sunny 2026), emerging players like Sarvam AI reflect a shift to Indian-owned platforms.

The ₹10,300 crore investment over 5 years for the IndiaAI Mission, deploying 38,000 GPUs (PIB 2025), organising the  AI India Impact Summit in February of this year, and the IndiaAI fellowship for students demonstrate the Indian government’s commitment to developing an AI ecosystem and skilled workforce.  

Why Not Just Another GCC?

India already hosts over 2,117 global capability centres, where Indian engineers work on projects owned by foreign firms. A UAE company could simply open one in Bengaluru. But the GCC model is a service relationship: the foreign parent owns the compute, the models, and the IP, and India supplies labour. This is exactly the pattern Sunny (2026) identifies as the limit of India’s IT industry.

The corridor proposed here differs in three ways:

• Ownership: resulting models and datasets are jointly owned, not owned by the foreign parent.
• Access: Indian firms get contractually guaranteed compute time that cannot be revoked unilaterally.
• Custody: a copy of model weights is held in India by a trusted third party.

Proposal – India- UAE AI Corridor 

The UAE and India can explore the possibility of an AI corridor with a dual R&D operating model. Here, Indian firms provide the salaries and the high-skilled workers will work on joint projects with the UAE remotely, while the UAE brings in the capital, access to its advanced computing infrastructure, high-quality chips, and a corridor premium for the workers. In this manner, India does not lose its high-skilled workforce permanently, while the UAE can tap into a steady stream of high-skilled Indian professionals.  Separate AI hubs can be set up within tech companies in India to utilise UAE-owned infrastructure for joint projects, while India’s own compute continues to serve domestic needs. Ownership of resulting AI models and datasets should be secured through joint-venture contracts (Srivastava & Yadav 2026). The contract should ensure that:

• Each party keeps the intellectual property it already holds and may use the jointly owned resultant models in its own markets.
• Indian firms get guaranteed computing time, which cannot be revoked unilaterally.
• If the partnership ends, both parties keep usage rights of existing models, with consent required from both sides if selling to third parties.
• A copy of the resultant model weights is held in India as well by a trusted third party.

Here, digital sovereignty means both parties can access the products it helps build without requiring permission. 

IIT Delhi Abu Dhabi is already running 7 joint research projects with the Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (Sengupta 2025), and in May 2026, the UAE agreed with the Indian Government to deploy a Cerebras AI supercomputer in India (Ghosh 2026, Srivastava & Yadav 2026), which shows that cooperation between the 2 nations regarding AI is not limited to abstract discussions. The corridor premium paid by UAE partners can be settled through the existing Local Currency Settlement System (LCSS) in rupees or dirhams, reducing dependence on the dollar.

Legal Alignment 

While India’s DPDP Act does not restrict the flow of data from India to the UAE (SFLC 2025), the reverse flow requires contractual safeguards under the UAE’s Personal Data Protection Law (Singh 2025), affecting cross-country data transfers. Since the existing India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement’s (CEPA) views on data-transfer commitments are limited, and with India’s newly notified DPDP Rules 2025, a binding data-sharing agreement is recommended. Compliance with the UAE National Third Party Security Policy is also required if Indian employees access UAE-owned AI infrastructure. Indian labour laws would apply to these professionals, as they are employed by Indian companies.

The corridor complements, rather than competes with, the UAE’s long-term talent strategy: it gives the UAE immediate access to skilled researchers while its domestic ecosystem matures. This modelled corridor with appropriate legal safeguards, ultimately combining India’s AI talent with the UAE’s infrastructure, will help their AI ambitions and support Digital Sovereignty.

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Mithun Rajesh is a Research Intern in the International Relations vertical at the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR), Kochi. 

Views expressed by the authors are personal and need not reflect or represent the views of the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR).