Dubai Cloud and Datacenter Convention & Awards 2025

The United Arab Emirates and its key city Dubai have played a key role in the regional digital ecosystem as a gateway into the Middle East and also as a major financial, commercial and resources hub in its own right. What is the international view of its current status? And of its future direction given the impact that AI and digital technologies are having and will have on shaping the digital world?

As with other major data center clusters around the world, the United Arab Emirates needs to balance growing demand for space and services against the resources required to deliver those.  There are increasing pressures, in particular the increasing deployment of AI and digital technologies to increase deliverables while reducing resource consumption.  How will data centers in the United Arab Emirates meet these evolving requirements? What more can they do?

The operational challenge presented by cooling and heat removal  is one of the longest established and most intractable in the data center world.  In the current situation greater demand is leading to higher rack densities which require more cooling and heat removal. Is this cycle inevitable? And if it is, how will technologies and practices need to evolve to break the cycle?

What future role will the enterprise data centre play, particularly as AI evolves into a major consideration of how and where to store and process your data? One of the key trends globally in the hosting of data has been the move from organisations running their own data centres to migrating their IT requirements to cloud or collocating their footprint. In established markets around the world, these processes have slowed as enterprise data centres find new roles. In particular, the trends towards hybrid IT and hybrid digital infrastructure have created a place for the enterprise data centres for sensitive and high-value information that the organisation wishes to keep close, as well as for applications and workloads unsuited for cloud.  Colocation initiatives have enables the ‘off-prem’ enterprise data centre.

The major trend in powering data centres lies away from reducing dependence on fossil fuels by moving towards power generated from sustainable and renewable sources.  The capacity to power the data centre from renewable sources has been restrained by difficulty of accessing renewable sources, by issues of cost and investment, the force of habit.

How will hyperscale impact the region’s digital future? In particular which digital services will hyperscale enable or improve, and what impact will this have on the economies and societies of different nations across MENA? As the most resource-hungry form of data centre what challenges might the roll out of hyperscale face?  How will other data centres be impacted by hyperscale? And how might it impact how other data centers are designed and operated across MENA?

There are a number of key metrics used to monitor and analyse data center operations and to analyse data center performance.  What are the strengths and weaknesses of different metrics and more broadly of the application of statistics to these tasks? What difference does replacing traditional metrics with algorithms make?  How will the use of AI as a management tool impact these considerations?

What impacts is the ‘skills shortage’ currently having on data centers and associated industries in the United Arab Emirates?   Our experts share their thoughts on how the United Arab Emirates should plan to develop policies and strategies to face the shortage and what the role of different stakeholder groups should be in doing so. What impacts will the growing role of AI in data centers have?

Increasing demand, shortage of space, greater requirements of compliance, rising costs of labour and materials. What is now the ROI case for building in the United Arab Emirates? Which innovations and techniques can be deployed when designing and building data centers to a required level of speed and scale?  How can the United Arab Emirates maintain and enhance its strong regional status through design and build?

The different economic and social profiles of the nations across the ‘Middle East’ and North Africa has usually meant that investment has been made on a nation by nation basis. Trends towards pan-nationalism and a shared cultural identity across some nations, the recognition that ‘bigger is better’ in order to carry economic weight in a world of mega- economies and the examples of national groupings across the world (the EU, ASEAN) means that the case for a view of MENA as a whole may be justified when it comes to data centre investment. How might this work? What opportunities would it create? What barriers might it face?   What role might different states – Abu Dhabi, Saudi, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates – play in this?