Siada an IOPn enterprise secures exclusive access to AI Datacenter in UAE

Siada, an IOPn enterprise, and Innovation City, the UAE’s premier AI-powered free zone, have secured exclusive access to the UAE’s first sovereign AI data center for their business ecosystem. The AI Sovereign data center is live, operational, and ready inside Innovation City in Ras Al Khaimah.

Siada, will operate the live sovereign AI data center and will plan to add additional sites across the UAE and MENA region. One of the biggest achievements is that Siada secured, installed and activated NVIDIA B200 GPUs with Innovation City becoming the first to deploy, allowing every computation to happen in UAE.

“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.”

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. 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.

“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.”

Siada builds, owns, and operates the sovereign compute infrastructure, while Innovation City provides the ecosystem where it goes live first. Together, IOPn and Innovation City understand the brutal realities tech builders face: rationed compute, data residency risks, regulatory friction, and ecosystems that treat AI as an afterthought.

In May 2026, UAE Innovation City, the UAE’s AI-powered free zone in Ras Al Khaimah, launched what it called the first blockchain enabled digital business identity system, where each registered business in the freezone will receive a sovereign cryptographically verified identity built on IOPn blockchain, the OPN Chain.

Earlier this year, G42 launched a new operating model allowing states to deploy sovereign AI securely and at scale. The initiative is designed to enhance data sovereignty within governments, allowing them to have full control over their countries’ data, systems and policies, regardless of where the infrastructure is located.

Live capacity surpassed 376 MW in 2025 as operators raced to lock in power, land, and government workloads ahead of 2026 expansions, according to a recent Knight Frank report. A major catalyst is hyperscale investment tied to national AI ambitions. Microsoft and Abu Dhabi-based G42 announced a 200 MW expansion of data center capacity in the UAE, with capacity expected to come online by the end of 2026.