Sovereign cloud providers in the GCC have spent the past few years selling customers on a simple promise that their data never leaves the country. Core42 is now betting that the more lasting advantage lies in owning the technology that guards that data, and it has turned to one of Abu Dhabi’s government research institutes to help build it.
The G42 company, which specialises in AI infrastructure and sovereign-enabled cloud, signed a strategic collaboration agreement with the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council, at GISEC Global 2026. Under the deal, the two organisations will co-develop, evaluate and deploy security technologies across Core42’s sovereign-enabled cloud and Compass, its generative and agentic AI platform. The work covers hardware security modules, confidential computing, encrypted AI inferencing, secure key management and distribution, data protection, encryption and trusted computing.
That list maps closely onto the pressure points that emerge as governments and regulated industries move sensitive data and AI models into shared cloud environments, where protecting information while it is being processed, and controlling who holds the cryptographic keys, matters as much as where the servers physically sit.
“Sovereignty means more than deciding where data and infrastructure reside; it is also about building the technology capabilities required to protect them from all angles,” said Rajeev Nair, Senior Vice President, Special Projects, at Core42. “Working with TII gives us an opportunity to evaluate and advance UAE-developed sovereignty and cybersecurity technologies against the requirements of sovereign-enabled cloud and AI environments.”
For TII, whose Cryptography Research Center has produced work that rarely leaves the research setting, the agreement offers a commercial platform on which its output can be tested against real workloads and compliance demands.
“At TII, we are focused on translating advanced research into technologies that strengthen the UAE’s sovereign capabilities and address real-world security challenges,” said Dr Victor Juan Mateu, Chief Researcher at the centre.
Neither party disclosed a timeline, investment figure or the first technologies due for deployment, which means the measure of the partnership will be whether a TII-built component reaches Core42’s production environment, and how quickly.
