UAE’s MBZUAI Launches Fully Sovereign AI Model

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to support the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) technological sovereignty was announced Tuesday (Jan. 27) by G42, Cerebras Systems and the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

The new K2 Think V2 is a 70 billion parameter advanced reasoning system built on the K2-V2 base model, which is an open-source foundation model from IFM, MBZUAI said in a Tuesday (Jan. 27) press release.

“By upgrading the base model to K2-V2, K2 Think V2 unlocks a new level of performance, openness and independence, reinforcing the UAE’s leadership in building frontier-grade AI systems that are globally accessible and fully sovereign,” MBZUAI said in the release.

K2 Think V2 operates a fully sovereign system end-to-end; is open, inspectable and independently reproducible at every stage; and solves complex problems step-by-step using long chains of thought across mathematics, science, coding, logic and simulation, according to the release.

“We are working towards further improving K2 Think with the aim of developing the most capable general-purpose models tuned for reasoning, tool-use and agentic capabilities,” the MBZUAI Institute of Foundation Models, K2 Think team wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

PYMNTS reported in June 2025 that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are locked in a high-stakes race to be the main AI tech hub in the Middle East.

Both are spending and attracting veritable fortunes for their ambitions, forming strategic alliances with U.S. tech giants, and planning to build some of the world’s largest data center clusters.

The UAE created MBZUAI, an AI university, as part of this effort. The university has since launched lab facilities in Abu Dhabi, Paris and Silicon Valley.

It was reported in February 2024 that the UAE was positioning itself as a leader in regulating and testing AI technologies and that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the UAE could serve as a “regulatory sandbox” to experiment with AI and develop global rules to govern it.

In December 2025, MBZUAI, Cerebras and Inception, a G42 company, launched an open-weight Arabic large language model called Jais 2, saying it was “trained on the richest Arabic-first dataset to date.”