National AI Strategies Compared: EU, India, Japan and the Gulf

The European Union, India, Japan and the Gulf states are backing domestic AI capacity, but they are buying different things. The EU pools funds for shared supercomputers. India subsidizes access to chips. Japan is backing a SoftBank-led group to build a domestic model. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are building large data centers with US partners. Headline figures are not directly comparable. They mix budgets, financing agreements and private investment that has yet to arrive.

How do the EU's AI gigafactories and EuroHPC work?

The EU channels its spending through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, its supercomputing body. According to the European Commission, 19 AI Factories and 13 linked "antennas" are being set up around EuroHPC machines. It puts investment in supercomputers and AI Factories by the Commission, member states and associated countries at €10 billion for 2021 to 2027.

AI gigafactories are the next step. The Commission says these facilities will have more than 100,000 advanced AI processors. Euronews reported that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the InvestAI initiative in February 2025. The report said the goal was to mobilize €200 billion, including €20 billion for gigafactories. An informal call for interest later drew 77 proposals covering 60 sites in 16 member states, the Commission says.

On July 30, 2026, EuroHPC opened a formal call for up to seven gigafactories. It describes them as industry-led. The Commission says up to €10 billion in EU and national funding is expected to unlock at least €20 billion in private investment. The private share is an expectation, not a commitment.

What is the IndiaAI Mission?

The Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission in March 2024, according to the government's Press Information Bureau. It gives the outlay as ₹10,371.92 crore over five years. A crore is 10 million.

Its compute pillar offers GPUs, the chips used to train AI models, at subsidized rates. They are offered through cloud providers approved by the government. By December 2025 the government said more than 38,000 had been onboarded at ₹65 per hour. On February 17, 2026, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said another 20,000 would be added within weeks. These are the government's own counts of capacity made available, not measures of use.

Vaishnaw also said he expected more than $200 billion of investment in India's AI ecosystem over two years. That is a forecast, not a budget line.

What is Japan's national AI strategy?

Japan's cabinet adopted an AI Basic Plan on December 23, 2025, according to the OECD's AI policy observatory. It says the plan was adopted under an AI promotion law enacted earlier that year. Strengthening AI development capabilities is one of the plan's four policy areas.

Jiji Press reported in December 2025 that the government planned about 1 trillion yen in aid for domestic AI development over five years. It said that included around 300 billion yen in the fiscal 2026 budget. On July 1, 2026, Nikkei Asia reported that the government would provide up to 1 trillion yen (about $6.16 billion) to a group of nine companies. It said the group is led by SoftBank Corp. and includes Honda, NEC and Sony. The group plans a domestic foundation model for "physical AI," meaning AI built into robots and machines. It plans to build the model with data from Japanese companies.

What is Stargate UAE, and what is Saudi Arabia building?

Stargate UAE, announced on May 22, 2025, is a planned 1-gigawatt computing cluster in Abu Dhabi. The Emirati firm G42 will build it. OpenAI and Oracle will operate it, with Nvidia supplying the AI systems. The partners presented it as part of a 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI campus. They said the first 200 megawatts was expected to go live in 2026.

That wider plan is under review. Reuters reported on September 11, 2026, citing unnamed sources, that the UAE was revising the 5-gigawatt project. The report said the revision followed Iranian missile and drone attacks on Gulf states. It said the UAE would probably spread data centers across the country instead of using a single site. Reuters put the cost of the 1-gigawatt cluster at $30 billion. It said construction of the cluster was expected to continue with added protection against air attack.

Saudi Arabia's vehicle is Humain, an AI company set up by the Public Investment Fund in May 2025. It aims for 1.9 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2030 and more than 6 gigawatts by 2034, Fortune reported in September 2026. Financing reported so far includes an agreement reported by Reuters in January 2026. Reuters said the agreement was for up to $1.2 billion from Saudi Arabia's National Infrastructure Fund, to support up to 250 megawatts.

Both projects rely on American chips. The National reported in November 2025 that the US Commerce Department had authorized exports of Nvidia AI chips to G42 and Humain. It said the authorization was subject to security and reporting requirements.

What to watch

• EU: Gigafactory bids are due by November 12, 2026, and EuroHPC expects to select sites in early 2027.
• India: Whether the additional 20,000 GPUs are confirmed as available to users.
• Japan: How the aid of up to 1 trillion yen is paid out.
• Gulf: Whether Stargate UAE's first 200 megawatts is operating by the end of 2026, and what the UAE's revised campus plan looks like.