Core42 opens Dublin headquarters to expand ‘sovereign’ AI infrastructure across Europe
Core42, the AI infrastructure business within Abu Dhabi’s G42 group, has announced it will establish its European headquarters in Dublin, positioning Ireland as its central base for regional operations as European organisations push to scale AI in production.
The company said the new hub will support customer delivery, technical leadership, and partner engagement across Europe, with formal operations set to begin in early 2026 and headcount expected to grow across engineering, customer success, and ecosystem roles during the year.
The announcement was made at Investopia’s Global Dialogue series in Dublin this week, where Core42 framed the move as a response to rising demand from European enterprises and governments for secure, high-performance compute and cloud infrastructure.
The timing matters because Europe’s AI agenda is increasingly constrained by infrastructure realities - access to GPUs, power availability, and the governance requirements of regulated industries and public-sector deployments. By establishing a headquarters within the EU, Core42 is signalling its intention to compete not just for commercial cloud workloads, but also for the more politically sensitive “sovereign” AI conversations, where control, compliance, and compute location are central.
It also underlines a broader shift: Gulf-based AI players are moving beyond investment and partnerships into operational footprints across Europe, at the same moment governments are scrutinising who builds and runs strategic digital infrastructure.
Why Dublin, and why now
Dublin’s appeal is its combination of established cloud presence, deep technical talent, and a legal and regulatory environment within the EU. For companies selling infrastructure to government and regulated enterprises, that “inside the perimeter” status can be a prerequisite for procurement, partnership structures, and compliance alignment.
It is also a choice that sits in the middle of Europe’s most visible tension in AI infrastructure: the collision between rising compute demand and the constraints of electricity, grid capacity and planning. Data centres and AI clusters do not scale on software timelines; they scale on permitting, power connections and hardware supply.
From ‘AI interest’ to production workloads
Core42 was founded in 2023 by G42 to build infrastructure designed for large-scale AI, with a focus on sovereign cloud, advanced compute platforms and hyperscale AI environments. The company says it works with global ecosystem partners including Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD and Cerebras.
Through its AI Cloud platform, Core42 provides self-service access to high-performance compute for training, inference, and experimentation, alongside managed delivery and “AI solutioning” to help organisations move from cloud modernisation and data readiness to deployment at scale.
Core42 says the Dublin headquarters builds on an expansion anchored by sovereign compute initiatives across continental Europe. In France, the company has pointed to working with Data One and Oreus on a national-scale AI infrastructure deployment in Grenoble intended to support high-performance workloads across the enterprise and the public sector. In Italy, it has worked with Domyn to build what it describes as Europe’s largest AI compute cluster, positioning it as a foundation for accelerating the adoption of advanced AI.
The Dublin office is being cast as the coordination layer that turns those projects into a durable European operation - bringing delivery, engineering leadership, regulatory engagement and ecosystem partnerships under one roof, and placing Core42 closer to European institutions and decision-makers.
Report launch puts the infrastructure question front and centre
Alongside the headquarters announcement, Core42 and Emerging Markets Intelligence and Research (EMIR) launched a report at Investopia examining the infrastructure, policy and investment conditions required for Europe to accelerate its AI capabilities. The report draws on lessons from the UAE’s rapid AI scale-up and sets out guidance for governments, investors and enterprises developing sovereign-aligned AI ecosystems.
Core42’s interim chief executive, Talal M. Al Kaissi, said Europe is central to the company’s global expansion strategy and that the Dublin base will help it work more closely with customers and partners as they scale “production-grade AI” across key sectors.
Core42 has not disclosed the size of its initial Dublin team or the compute capacity it expects to serve from Ireland. But by formalising a European headquarters ahead of the next wave of AI procurement and regulation-driven compliance, the company is making a clear bet that Europe’s AI build-out will increasingly hinge on who can deliver infrastructure that is both high-performance and governable — and do so inside the region