e& UAE and Ankabut Extend Deal on Campus AI and Research Networks
The next phase adds AI and high-performance computing capacity and links campuses directly to local hyperscalers and large cloud environments.
Karim El-Sayed Karim El-Sayed covers company news, policy and regulation across the UAE and wider MENA for Anecdoted, with a focus on how new rules and licences reshape how startups operate. karim@anecdoted.com
e& UAE, the telecommunications arm of the technology group e&, and Ankabut, which operates the UAE's national research and education network, have renewed a partnership aimed at widening the digital infrastructure available to universities and research institutions nationwide.
The two organisations are moving into a phase that adds capacity in several areas:
- Artificial intelligence workloads
- High-performance computing
- Cloud connectivity
- Advanced research
- Collaboration with research networks outside the UAE
A private network built for AI
Under the agreement, the partners will develop a dedicated private education network. The aim is to give academic institutions high-capacity connections for demanding applications, among them training AI models, running inference on deep learning systems and data modelling. Campuses will also be connected directly to local AI hyperscalers and large-scale cloud environments, instead of reaching those resources across general-purpose links.
Abdulla Ebrahim Al Ahmed, who serves as e& UAE's chief of government and VVIP relations, said conventional network designs fall short of what education requires. He said the company is acting as the architect of a foundation for AI that is secure, scalable and resilient. Tying Ankabut's education network to e&'s connectivity and to hyperscalers based in the UAE, he said, opens a route for innovation developed at home and gives academic institutions sovereign, secure access to advanced AI tools and collaboration platforms.
Links to international research
The renewed agreement also widens connectivity between UAE academic institutions and research and education networks abroad, working through Ankabut's National Research and Education Network. That network supplies dedicated links among the country's education and research institutions and joins them to research partners worldwide and to cloud service providers operating in the UAE.
Tarek Jundi, Ankabut's chief executive, said research is entering a new stage in which high-performance computing and data-intensive collaboration have become central to the production of knowledge. Connecting institutions is no longer sufficient on its own, he said. The network has to function as a digital backbone that allows research on data to be carried out securely and under sovereign control. He described the work with e& UAE as a step in Ankabut's progression within the ecosystem, and said it is intended to strengthen the country's capabilities for years ahead.
The programme sits alongside the UAE's national artificial intelligence strategy and the broader effort to digitise the economy. Capacity is being added on the expectation that demand for AI, computing and data across higher education and research will keep climbing, and that existing links were not sized to carry it.
For universities, the practical effect is a set of connections built for machine learning workloads and for sharing large datasets with partners in other countries, rather than routing that traffic over commercial paths designed for ordinary internet use.
