Mubadala Investment Company and Together AI have agreed to explore artificial intelligence infrastructure opportunities in the United Arab Emirates, extending a relationship that already includes a financial investment. The partnership includes plans for the San Francisco-based company to establish a presence in Abu Dhabi.
The companies intend to identify opportunities for AI development and deployment in the country. Together AI’s planned local presence is intended to bring its research and inference capabilities closer to regional developers. Inference is the process of using a trained AI model to produce an answer or other output.
Mubadala said it had participated with $100 million in Together AI’s Series C financing.
Ali Eid AlMheiri, Executive Director, Diversified Assets, UAE Investments Platform at Mubadala, said: "At Mubadala, we focus on attracting leading technology companies, deepening local capabilities and creating an environment where innovation can move from research to real-world application. Our collaboration with Together AI supports that ambition by strengthening a critical part of the AI ecosystem and expanding access to the infrastructure. Together AI’s decision to establish an office in Abu Dhabi will deepen its engagement with the UAE’s rapidly developing technology ecosystem that creates long-term economic value for the emirate and the wider UAE."
Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Together AI, added: "The demand for open-source AI is outpacing the compute available to serve it. Developers want open models because they can own, shape and deploy them however they want, but that only works if the infrastructure underneath is fast, efficient, and actually there when you need it. We're scaling that infrastructure globally, and Mubadala is exactly the kind of partner that helps us do it at speed."
Earlier Financing Provides the Investment Context
Together AI announced an $800 million Series C round in July. Its legal adviser, Latham & Watkins, separately confirmed the financing and an $8.3 billion post-money valuation. The law firm said Aramco Ventures led the round, with investors including NVIDIA, Vista Equity Partners and General Catalyst.
In its July funding announcement, Together AI also said it had secured commitments for more than 500 megawatts of computing capacity, to be capitalized independently by new investors.
The financing and computing commitments provide a broader backdrop to Together AI’s expansion plans.
Computing Services Bring a Commercial Dimension
Together AI’s business includes providing infrastructure on which customers run AI models. Its dedicated inference offering reserves computing resources for individual workloads, while its serverless service allows customers to access models through shared infrastructure. These arrangements give businesses different ways to purchase the capacity needed to operate applications.
According to the company’s product descriptions, serverless inference is billed per token, a unit of text or other information processed by a model. Dedicated inference reserves graphics processing units and is billed by GPU-hour. The choice affects how customers pay as application usage changes.
A business testing an application may have different requirements from one handling a steady stream of requests. Together AI describes shared capacity as suitable for variable traffic and dedicated resources as suited to predictable workloads. Those are service options available on its platform, rather than terms announced for the UAE partnership.
The commercial question is how regional demand would translate into paid usage and infrastructure commitments. A partnership can help a provider develop local relationships, but financial performance depends on the contracts, prices and operating arrangements that follow.
UAE Strategy Supplies the Policy Background
The initiative comes against the backdrop of the UAE’s established AI policy. The Cabinet adopted its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031 in April 2019, setting an ambition to expand the technology’s use in areas including education, government services and community wellbeing.
The government’s description of the strategy also identifies improved government performance and AI investment among its aims. These objectives provide context for attracting technology businesses.
Computing infrastructure can support that effort alongside research expertise, skilled workers and businesses adopting AI applications. These resources can help organizations develop and deploy services suited to their operational needs, with costs and practical benefits guiding adoption.
