Even before the halls of Gitex Global 2025 open to the public, the hum inside e&’s pavilion feels deliberate - more command centre than showroom. Engineers calibrate drones, servers blink behind glass racks labelled ‘Sovereign AI Lab – Made in the UAE,’ and the quiet buzz of robots testing their movement fills the air.
When I arrived for an early walk-through with Hatem Dowidar, e& group chief executive, he was quick to point not to the robots, flying taxi, or the holograms, but toward a wall of black server racks.
“This,” he says, “is where policy becomes infrastructure.”
Tapping a black cabinet humming beside us, he adds: “That’s the country’s first engineered ‘Sovereign AI Lab’ showcase. When people talk about sovereignty, this is what they mean: compute, cloud, and connectivity all owned, operated, and protected inside the UAE.”
Digital sovereignty has become one of the most loaded phrases and fiercely debated ideas in 2025. Around the world, governments are debating who owns data, where it should live, and how artificial intelligence must be governed.
The EU’s Digital Markets Act, India’s data-localisation rules, and new frameworks in Saudi Arabia, Japan and Brazil all point in one direction – control and accountability are now prerequisites for growth.
Sovereign cloud, Dowidar says, is not a retreat from global networks but a governed layer that keeps data under national jurisdiction while remaining linked to world-class platforms.
For the UAE, the race isn’t to build another cloud but to engineer sovereignty into the fabric of its digital infrastructure.
“We learnt early that you can’t innovate on uncertainty,” Dowidar says. “While others are still arguing about the guardrails, the UAE has already built them; that’s why we can move faster.”
“Sovereignty isn’t about shutting doors,” he says, “It’s knowing which doors you can open safely.”
Across the pavilion, engineers demonstrate that principle in motion. Two installations anchor the idea: the ‘Engine of UAE Sovereign AI’ and the ‘Sovereign AI Lab’ demo. Together, they illustrate how national policy is being written directly into hardware, showing how compute, cloud, and governance are being rooted in-country while staying connected to global systems.
Nearby sits the ‘UAE Sovereign Cloud Launchpad,’ built by e& enterprise, AWS, and endorsed by the UAE Cybersecurity Council. Following its initial debut earlier this year, it is purpose-designed for regulated sectors that need on-shore residency and real-time compliance visibility. Exact feature sets remain under wraps ahead of the expected next evolution of the UAE’s sovereign cloud ecosystem, scheduled for later this week.
Across the hall, the ‘UAE Sovereign Cloud Launchpad’, built by e& enterprise with AWS and endorsed by the UAE Cybersecurity Council, extends that model. Following its debut this year, it serves regulated sectors that need onshore data storage and continuous compliance monitoring.
“People think sovereignty means isolation,” he says. “It doesn’t. It means knowing, at any given moment, where your data resides and who can access it. It’s transparency, not paranoia.”
He explains that the UAE’s strength lies not in keeping everything behind a wall but in having the choice of what to keep local, what to share, and how to connect outward. “Choice,” he adds, “is the real definition of sovereignty.”
Two additional sovereign-AI infrastructures will be previewed at Gitex, signalling how the UAE’s compute backbone is scaling from lab to national platform.
“It’s a working example of how partnerships and policy can coexist,” Dowidar says. “Less about ownership than stewardship.”
Sovereignty is not a cure-all, he said. “Every nation needs a spectrum of control. The UAE’s advantage is that we built the governance first; technology followed the rules, not the other way around.”
Across the wider tech landscape, the debate echoes similar concerns from Washington to Riyadh to Singapore, where policymakers are re-examining dependencies in the digital supply chain – from semiconductors and cloud to AI compute. According to industry estimates from Polaris Market Research, the sovereign-cloud sector is growing quickly and could exceed $100 billion globally by 2034, representing a 29.8 per cent compounded annual growth rate.
A new UN Trade and Development report projects that the global AI market will expand from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033 – a 25-fold increase in just a decade, underscoring the scale of the coming AI compute demand and shifting attention from who trains the biggest models to who controls the energy, data, and infrastructure beneath them.
Dowidar argues that the UAE’s model is a middle path, balancing national control with open collaboration.
“Sovereignty isn’t a flag,” he says. “It’s a framework that gives nations choices, the ability to decide what stays on-shonshoret to federate, and how to collaborate globally without losing accountability.”
Across another zone, engineers show what that looks like in practice. The ‘MissionOn Command Vehicle’ demo, parked at the edge of the stand, functions as a mobile data centre fitted with high-definition bodycams, drones, and a private 5G link that co-ordinates field teams without using the public network. Next to it, a ‘5G-in-a-Box’ – a portable network bubble – demo powers a mock emergency site.
Inside, ‘Help AG’s Cloud SOC’ dashboard demo streams live threat data, while a Business Continuity-as-a-Service model simulates how banks or utilities could reroute operations during a crisis.
Dowidar sums it up simply: sovereignty provides control; resilience ensures continuity. When a network can reroute itself in a crisis and the command centre is already online in a vehicle outside, that’s digital sovereignty expressed through capability.
“Resilience is about the ability to continue, not just to connect,” Dowidar notes. “When a hospital keeps its digital systems alive through a network failure, that’s not luck. That’s architecture.”
The distinction matters. Sovereignty helps keep critical systems under national jurisdiction, but resilience also relies on network design and human readiness. As e& engineers describe it, sovereignty is the “trust layer,” resilience is the “performance layer.” One enables the other, but neither stands alone.
The physical network is the final piece. At Gitex, e& demonstrated the UAE’s first 5.5G network, recently deployed by e& UAE, offering multi-gigabit speeds and near-instant response capabilities essential for autonomous systems and real-time analytics. A nearby robotic-arm demo streams high-definition video over 5.5G, also known as 5G-Advanced, while a dashboard shows how network slices can be dedicated to emergency services or logistics fleets.
Data from GSMA estimates that 5G-Advanced and early 6G investments could reach $1.3 trillion by 2030, with the Middle East among the fastest-adopting regions. Dowidar describes 5.5G as the connective tissue between sovereignty and resilience. “You can build sovereign clouds and secure frameworks,” he says, “but if the network underneath isn’t intelligent, the whole stack wobbles.”
Beyond the hardware, e& highlights the governance layer of digital sovereignty. At the ‘AI Cultural & Ethical Innovation Booth,’ visitors generate AI portraits with voice clones, then sign a digital pledge for responsible AI use. The display connects to e&’s AI Governance Framework, co-designed with IBM and now used across more than a thousand AI cases within the group.
“People should leave this space a little amazed and a little unsettled,” he says. “That’s good. It means they’re thinking about responsibility, not just possibility.”
Why? “Transparency and explainability are becoming new measures of performance,” Dowidar says. “Technology earns trust only when people understand what it’s doing.”
The OECD counts more than 70 jurisdictions developing national AI ethics frameworks; yet, a UN report from last year found that 118 countries lack participation in any global AI governance initiative. Few, however, are demonstrating their principles through tangible infrastructure; and that, Dowidar says, is where the UAE differentiates itself.
While much of e&’s exhibit speaks to national capability, Dowidar stresses that the strategy is intentionally outward-looking. He adds that sovereignty doesn’t end at the border. “Every country will draw its own data boundaries,” he says, “but they don’t need to draw them around innovation.”
Dowidar hints at several coming partnerships, still under wraps – to be unveiled later in the week – that will strengthen how the UAE’s sovereign infrastructure connects with global technology ecosystems.
Globally, the idea of interoperability, a federated approach, is gaining traction. In Europe, projects such as GAIA-X seek to link national sovereign clouds; in Asia, Japan and Singapore are piloting trusted data corridors. The UAE, Dowidar says, adds a Middle Eastern dimension to that conversation – open to the world, governed at home.
“The UAE has always thrived by being open,” Dowidar says, “but openness needs structure. So, you build resilience the same way you build trust, layer upon layer – cloud, AI, connectivity, and governance. That’s how you protect a digital nation.”
The risks are clear and far from academic: the World Economic Forum lists cyber-insecurity among the top five global threats for 2025, and analysts estimate the cost of cybercrime will reach $10 trillion by year-end. As economies digitise their critical infrastructure, the ability to combine sovereignty, resilience, and openness may define competitiveness in the decade ahead.
Dowidar frames it plainly: “Resilience is the test you pass when theory meets crisis. Sovereignty gives you the confidence to run that test your way.”
As engineers dim the lights for the final rehearsal, the rows of hardware in e&’s pavilion hum like a living system – servers, sensors, and networks exchanging quiet signals of control and continuity.
Today, visitors arriving at e& Pavilion at Gitex on opening day will see a spectacle of drones, robots, and holograms, but the subtler story runs underneath: a nation refining how it governs the invisible.
“The future won’t belong to countries that build walls,” Dowidar says. “It will belong to those that build confidence and collaborate securely.”
This page was produced by The National in partnership with e&.
