Core42 and Technology Innovation Institute Ink Strategic Pact to Fortify UAE Sovereign Cloud and Compass AI with Homegrown Cryptography
DUBAI — Artificial intelligence infrastructure provider Core42, a G42 subsidiary, has finalized a strategic collaboration agreement with the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research division of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), to accelerate the co development, technical evaluation, and enterprise deployment of UAE built digital sovereignty and cybersecurity architectures.
Signed on the sidelines of GISEC Global 2026 in Dubai, the partnership establishes a formal operational conduit linking applied national scientific research directly with live enterprise platforms. The initiative focuses on embedding indigenous security solutions across Core42’s sovereign cloud environments and Compass, its proprietary platform powering generative and agentic artificial intelligence workflows.
The technical scope of the collaboration targets critical cryptographic and structural protections required to shield high value cognitive workloads and institutional datasets. Joint engineering tracks will encompass:
Hardware security modules and confidential computing enclaves to safeguard data during execution.
Encrypted artificial intelligence inferencing protocols to preserve model weights and prompt confidentiality.
Secure cryptographic key distribution architectures and automated key lifecycle management.
Advanced trusted computing bases and data protection mechanisms engineered to meet stringent UAE sovereign data residency and regulatory compliance baselines.
The alliance arrives at a pivotal juncture as regional enterprises and government entities accelerate the migration of sensitive workloads into cloud architectures, necessitating cryptographic verification that extends beyond perimeter firewalls down to the silicon and model inference layers.
Rajeev Nair, Senior Vice President of Special Projects at Core42, emphasized that digital sovereignty requires far more than physical geography and data center locations, requiring indigenous capabilities to defend infrastructure from all architectural angles. Nair noted that testing TII’s cutting edge research against live commercial platforms ensures the UAE transitions from merely consuming imported cybersecurity tools to building the sovereign technologies that safeguard national digital assets.
Dr. Victor Juan Mateu, Chief Researcher at the Cryptography Research Center within the Technology Innovation Institute, highlighted that the collaboration creates a vital commercial proving ground to translate lab developed cryptography and trusted computing mechanisms into scaled operational environments, reinforcing the UAE’s trajectory as a global epicenter for secure deep technology innovation.
