Marking 50 Years: Etisalat Repositions as AI-Native Telco with Historic Global Subsea and Terrestrial Expansion
ABU DHABI — In the presence of His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister, and Chairman of the Presidential Court, multinational telecommunications group etisalat has launched an infrastructure mega project engineered to expand international digital connectivity capacity to more than 500 terabits per second (Tbps) by 2030.
The strategic buildout marks an increase of more than twenty five times over the group’s existing twenty terabits per second international baseline. Designed to establish resilient, low latency data corridors connecting the United Arab Emirates with international commercial centers, the network expansion will deploy diversified terrestrial and subsea cable systems. The expanded bandwidth capacity is engineered to anchor the colossal compute workloads required by domestic artificial intelligence campuses, hyperscale cloud facilities, and high frequency financial networks while maintaining absolute national data sovereignty.
His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, attending in his capacity as Chairman of the Emirates Investment Authority (EIA), the principal shareholder in etisalat group, affirmed that robust digital infrastructure forms the cornerstone of an innovation driven, knowledge based economy. His Highness emphasized that the country’s objective extends beyond passive technological adoption to actively building and governing advanced technologies, ensuring public and private institutions deploy cognitive systems at national scale with complete infrastructure assurance.
The announcement coincided with the launch of etisalat’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, unveiling an updated corporate roadmap to transition the operator into an artificial intelligence powered and enabling telecommunications champion under its legacy brand name etisalat. The operational framework is structured across four primary business engines: telecommunications, artificial intelligence and enterprise business solutions, digital infrastructure, and financial technology.
His Excellency Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Alzaabi, Chairman of etisalat group, noted that scaling international connectivity from twenty to over five hundred terabits per second addresses looming structural bottlenecks in cross border data flows driven by global foundation model training and distributed inference workloads. Alzaabi stated that the multi route topology ensures uncompromised reliability across the operator’s footprint spanning thirty eight countries and more than 250 million subscribers, securing direct conduits into global digital supply chains.
