Dubai: The UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, along with Khazna Data Centers and Agility, has announced a pilot program to implement Phaidra's AI technology aimed at enhancing energy efficiency across data centers and district cooling operations in the UAE. This announcement was made during the World Governments Summit in Dubai and builds upon a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) previously signed between the Ministry and Agility.
According to Emirates News Agency, the MoU was signed during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week by Eng. Sharif Al Olama, Undersecretary for Energy and Petroleum Affairs at the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, and Tarek Sultan, Chairman of Agility. This agreement sets a framework for collaboration to improve the energy efficiency and economic performance of energy-intensive digital infrastructure, reinforcing the UAE's status as a regional and global hub for AI and digital infrastructure investment.
The pilot will explore the deployment of advanced control system technology created by Phaidra, a leader in artificial intelligence agents for optimizing AI infrastructure. Phaidra's AI systems are designed to manage the complex power, cooling, and workload management systems of modern AI data centers for maximum tokens-per-watt efficiency, a critical factor as AI workloads demand increased energy and performance.
This effort builds on Khazna's partnership with NVIDIA to boost AI infrastructure development across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. Khazna is working on designing and constructing next-generation AI factories using NVIDIA's DSX Blueprint, a comprehensive reference architecture for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Khazna's expertise in hyperscale operations will aid in the deployment and evaluation of Phaidra's reinforcement learning agents across selected data center campuses. The pilot aims to assess the potential to significantly reduce cooling energy consumption, increase IT capacity, and improve the resilience and reliability of critical AI infrastructure, especially in high-temperature environments.
The collaboration between the Ministry, Khazna, and Agility aims to explore opportunities to scale AI-enabled optimization solutions more broadly across the UAE, supporting sustainability and energy-efficiency goals in line with the UAE Net Zero 2050 Strategy and the Ministry's Energy Efficiency Strategy.
Engineer Sharif Al Olama highlighted the importance of enhancing energy-intensive infrastructure efficiency, emphasizing that this partnership is part of the UAE's competitiveness and sustainability agenda. Tarek Sultan noted the significance of public-private collaboration in the evolving AI landscape, emphasizing the role of advanced AI control systems in improving efficiency and infrastructure resilience.
Khazna's CEO, Hassan Alnaqbi, discussed the transformative impact of AI-driven demand on data centers, stressing the responsibility to scale sustainably while enabling digital and AI ambitions. Jim Gao, CEO of Phaidra, expressed enthusiasm for partnering with key stakeholders to pioneer next-generation digital infrastructure in the MEA region.
