Raghu Chakravarthi, EVP of Engineering and General Manager – Americas at Core42, spoke to TECHx Media at GITEX Global 2025 about the company’s approach to AI and cloud infrastructure. He detailed how Core42 is enabling AI adoption through its AI Cloud, sovereign platforms, and collaborative partnerships while ensuring compliance and data security.

Core42’s presence at GITEX this year highlights the company’s leadership in AI infrastructure and sovereign cloud innovation. Could you share what technologies or announcements you’re most excited to showcase and how they demonstrate Core42’s engineering excellence?

This year at GITEX, we are showcasing the engineering breakthroughs that define Core42’s leadership in sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure. Demonstrating within the G42 District in AI Hall 6, we are presenting G42 Group’s vision for Building AI-Native Nations and highlighting our role as the digital infrastructure arm of the Intelligence Grid ecosystem.

At the centre of our showcase is our AI Cloud, a high-performance, scalable, and sovereign platform that brings every leading accelerator together under one roof, enabling the full lifecycle of AI adoption by providing a unified solution for all training, fine-tuning, and inference needs. We have already announced the launch of self-service capabilities within our AI Cloud that allow users to access NVIDIA-accelerated compute within minutes, bringing unprecedented speed, flexibility and accessibility to large-scale AI development. And we will continue to announce new partnerships designed to extend the UAE’s technological leadership globally, as we simultaneously demonstrate key offerings such as our Sovereign Public Cloud, our Signature Private Cloud – which is currently in Customer Preview, and our Compass generative AI platform.

Together, these technologies reflect how Core42 is engineering the invisible foundations of AI for the nation and beyond. Each innovation demonstrates our commitment to building infrastructure that is not only powerful and scalable, but also trusted, compliant, and ready for the next generation of AI workloads. At GITEX, our goal is to show how sovereign infrastructure can become the engine that drives national competitiveness, accelerates digital transformation, and shapes the future of AI-driven economies.

Building sovereign AI infrastructure at scale comes with significant technical and operational challenges. What have been some of the biggest engineering hurdles, and how has Core42 addressed them?

Building sovereign AI infrastructure at scale requires overcoming complex challenges in performance, scalability, interoperability, and governance. At Core42, we have addressed these by rethinking cloud architecture from the ground up to ensure that advanced computing capabilities operate within a framework of national trust and compliance.

One of the biggest engineering hurdles has been achieving the agility and performance of global hyperscalers while ensuring that all data, workloads, and AI models remain within sovereign boundaries. To solve this, we built the Core42 AI Cloud with multi-accelerator orchestration, high-speed interconnects, and automated resource provisioning that allow organizations to deploy and scale AI workloads seamlessly.

Equally important has been ensuring interoperability across environments while maintaining end-to-end security and policy enforcement. Our Insight platform provides unified governance, compliance controls and security guardrails across every layer of the AI ecosystem, enabling full visibility and trust in how data and models are managed. These guardrails ensure that sovereignty is reinforced by security, providing assurance that every AI operation remains protected, compliant, and accountable. Together, these capabilities make it possible to deliver sovereign AI at scale, combining world-class performance with the assurance of national data protection and regulatory alignment.

According to you, what capabilities or partnerships will be most important to strengthen Core42’s position as a leader in sovereign AI innovation?

At Core42, our leadership lies not only in the infrastructure we build but also in the ecosystems we create. We combine world-class engineering with partnerships that extend our capabilities, accelerate innovation, and strengthen trust across every layer of technology.

From an engineering standpoint, our priority is to continue evolving the AI Cloud as a unified platform that supports every stage of the AI lifecycle. The recent introduction of self-service capabilities within our AI Cloud  marks a major step forward in democratizing access to sovereign AI infrastructure. It allows enterprises, developers, and government entities to instantly deploy advanced compute resources, experiment, and scale AI workloads with full compliance and control.

Looking ahead, partnerships that expand our ecosystem will be essential to maintaining our momentum. This includes collaborations with global GPU and hardware leaders, data infrastructure innovators such as VAST Data, hyperscalers including Microsoft and technology partners like Oreus, iGenius and Northern Data Group that help us extend our international footprint. Together, these alliances enable us to deliver a more powerful, interoperable, and globally connected sovereign AI environment that advances both national priorities and cross-border innovation.

Looking ahead to 2026, what key trends or emerging technologies do you believe will define the next phase of AI and cloud transformation both globally and in the Middle East?

In 2026 and beyond, AI and cloud transformation will be defined by the integration of compute, data, and intelligence into unified, sovereign ecosystems. Globally, we are seeing rapid advancements in large-scale model training, agentic systems, and energy-efficient AI architectures that are reshaping how nations and enterprises build digital infrastructure. The next phase will be about how these technologies can be deployed responsibly, sustainably, and at scale.

In the Middle East, the priority is to translate these global innovations into sovereign environments that deliver performance with assurance. Governments and enterprises are moving from experimentation to implementation, and that shift demands infrastructure that combines agility, compliance, and control. At Core42, we are embedding security and governance guardrails that enable responsible AI development and rapid experimentation before enterprise-wide adoption. These capabilities ensure that innovation happens safely, with the right oversight and accountability frameworks in place, empowering organizations to test, validate, and deploy AI responsibly at scale. We are committed to providing the digital infrastructure to support this transition while keeping data fully protected within national frameworks.

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