etisalat to Raise International Connectivity to Over 500 Tbps by 2030

etisalat will push its international connectivity capacity past 500 terabits per second by 2030, up from 20 Tbps today — a jump of more than 25 times. The group described the move as a strategic project to widen its digital infrastructure inside the UAE and across its overseas markets.

The plan was announced in the presence of H.H. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court. Sheikh Mansour, who also chairs the Emirates Investment Authority, the main shareholder in etisalat group, was briefed on how the group intends to expand the infrastructure underpinning AI technologies and the wider digital economy.

Part of the work involves laying out diversified connectivity routes. Those routes are meant to make the network more dependable and to hold latency low, at a time when demand from artificial intelligence, cloud computing and the broader digital economy keeps climbing.

A national bet on AI infrastructure

Sheikh Mansour framed the investment as part of a longer national programme. The UAE, he said, keeps putting money into advanced digital infrastructure on the strength of a belief that readiness for what comes next depends on having the enablers that support economic growth, speed up innovation and sharpen the country's global competitiveness.

AI sits at the centre of that development path, he said, and building out digital capabilities creates the ecosystem needed to capture its potential. The aim, in his words, is for every institution in the country, public and private, to be able to build and innovate with AI at the scale the coming decade will require, with confidence in the infrastructure beneath it.

Four business areas, one governing idea

The launch lands in the same week as etisalat's 50th anniversary. Alongside it, the group set out a new vision: to become an AI-powered telecommunications company. Its strategy runs across four business areas — telecommunications, AI and business solutions, infrastructure, and fintech.

H.E. Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Alzaabi, Chairman of etisalat group, said the project reflects a conviction that the UAE should govern AI and build with it rather than simply adopt it, which demands digital infrastructure on a scale that prepares the country for the future.

Moving international connectivity from 20 terabits per second to more than 500 is a strategic step to address the growing challenges facing global data processing and data flow, particularly given the tremendous advancements in AI.

Alzaabi said the added capacity would serve UAE AI campuses, global cloud providers, and the group's own operations and customers across its markets. Combined with diversified routes and a low-latency design, he said, the project should keep the country tied to the global digital economy quickly, directly and resiliently, while protecting the UAE's digital sovereignty.

He tied the effort back to the group's history, saying the same commitment has guided it for fifty years and that each generation of technology has seen etisalat build infrastructure the nation relies on. AI, he said, is the defining technology of this generation, and the principle has not changed.

etisalat group operates in 38 countries and counts more than 250 million subscribers.