etisalat at 50: 500 Tbps, 200MW of data centres and a bet on AI

When etisalat marked its fiftieth anniversary in October 2026, the first commitment it made was a number. The group said it would raise its international connectivity capacity from about 20 terabits per second to more than 500 by 2030. That is a twenty-five fold increase in four years.

The timing is not accidental. Companies across sectors are competing for computing capacity, building data centres and putting intelligent applications into production. Each of those moves loads more traffic onto the networks that carry data between facilities, businesses and countries. Reliable, high-performance connectivity has shifted from background utility to precondition for adopting new technology at all, and the more those networks are pushed, the more the businesses above them depend on them holding.

etisalat has spent fifty years building that capability. In 1976 it ran 36,000 fixed lines. Today it operates as a global group with close to 255 million subscribers in 38 countries, and it reported revenue of AED 57.6 billion and net profit of AED 17.2 billion for the first nine months of the year. The business has travelled a long way from its original national mandate.

Its stated ambition now is to be the world's leading AI-powered and AI-enabling telecom group. Following its third-quarter results it set a target of more than AED 100 billion in annual revenue by 2031.

Numbers are only part of the pitch. The argument underneath them is that telecom networks will be asked to do considerably more than transport information.

Why the name came back

The most visible decision attached to the new strategy was the return of the etisalat name. In 2022 the group had rebranded to reflect a footprint stretching across telecom, technology, digital services and investments, a marker of how far it had outgrown its origins as a national operator. Four years later, gathering everything under etisalat again says something about where the group expects growth to come from. Connectivity, the reasoning goes, matters more in an AI-shaped economy, not less.

The word means connection in Arabic, and that meaning has acquired weight. As businesses spend on AI, demand rises for the networks, computing infrastructure and secure digital services underneath it. etisalat presents these as capabilities it has built through decades of investment and expansion abroad.

Four engines, one link

The strategy organises the group around four business engines: telco, AI and business solutions, infrastructure, and fintech. Each carries a separate growth case. Connectivity is what ties them together.

AI is being applied on two fronts. Inside the business, it is meant to make etisalat's own networks and operations more efficient. Outside, it underpins the infrastructure and services companies and governments will need as adoption spreads.

Building capacity before the demand arrives

The technology changes; the pattern does not. etisalat was founded in 1976 as Emirtel, when the UAE was five years old, with the job of building the telecom infrastructure a young state needed.

By 1982 it had launched the first mobile network in the Gulf and the Middle East, years before handsets became ordinary objects. Five years later a submarine cable to India tightened the country's international links. Commercial internet services followed in 1995.

Mobile broadband, fibre and successive wireless generations, 5G among them, came after. Each was built for services and customer expectations that would only materialise years later.

Expansion abroad followed the same logic. It began with Zanzibar Telecom in 1999 and reached markets across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. Those investments produced networks, technical depth and customer relationships, assets that matter more, not less, when an industry turns over.

The economics have shifted

The industry of 2026 is not the one operators were navigating four years earlier. In 2022 the sector was pouring money into 5G, widening digital services and looking past conventional mobile and fixed access.

Ericsson expected global 5G subscriptions to pass one billion by the end of that year. By mid-2026 they had reached nearly 3.3 billion, and 5G was carrying roughly half of the world's mobile data traffic. Consumers and businesses alike have grown more dependent on digital services in the interval.

That demand has also exposed an old commercial problem. Operators sink capital into the networks that make digital growth possible, while technology platforms, applications and service providers collect much of the value created on top of them.

A 2025 study by the GSMA and the consulting firm Kearney put numbers on the imbalance. Mobile operators account for 85 per cent of global investment in mobile internet connectivity infrastructure, excluding end-user devices, roughly US$109 billion a year out of a total of US$127 billion. The same study found that 45 per cent of operators surveyed now treat AI monetisation as a strategic priority. For etisalat, the opening lies in taking a larger share of an economy its networks already carry.

From pipes to computing

Recent investments show how that is meant to work. In Europe, with etisalat PPF Telecom Group and Serbia's Office for IT and eGovernment, the group signed an MoU to explore lifting the country's national data centre capacity by up to 40 megawatts, part of an effort to position Serbia as a regional hub for sovereign cloud and digital services.

etisalat is working on both sides of the connection: giving networks the ability to talk to digital systems, and building the computing infrastructure that intelligent applications run on. etisalat UAE has added agentic AI capabilities to selected business connectivity services, pairing standard telecom offerings with access to intelligent applications and sovereign computing.

Its own operations are part of the plan. The group is working towards Level 4 autonomous networks by 2030, a roadmap that combines connectivity, AI and sovereign computing infrastructure.

Capacity for an AI economy

The international expansion is meant to link the UAE more tightly to global cloud providers, AI campuses and digital markets. Ambition extends to the buildings where the processing happens: the group plans to add more than 200 megawatts of data centre capacity by 2031.

As AI workloads grow, moving data between locations becomes the constraint. Organisations need to connect facilities across borders, reach cloud environments and support applications that cannot tolerate a slow or unreliable link.

For the UAE, that infrastructure feeds a national goal of becoming a centre for advanced technology and AI. For etisalat, it opens opportunities across a footprint of 38 countries at very different stages of digital development. Some markets still need basic connectivity and digital inclusion. Others are buying cloud services, enterprise technology and advanced computing. The spread lets the group chase whichever demand exists locally while drawing on capabilities built elsewhere in the group.

Fifty years ago the task was to wire a new country. The task now is to build the networks, computing platforms and intelligent services for an economy being reshaped by AI. The technologies and the markets differ. The habit of building capacity before customers ask for it does not.

"The smarter the world gets, the more it depends on connection," the company's vision statement puts it.

The smarter the world gets, the more it depends on connection,

What follows will be measured against figures already on the table: 500 terabits per second of international capacity by 2030, Level 4 autonomous networks in the same year, more than 200 megawatts of data centre capacity by 2031, and a revenue line the group expects to clear AED 100 billion.