Red Hat announced on May 11 a collaboration with Core42 to deliver sovereign cloud and artificial intelligence services for the public sector, defense, and other regulated industries across the United Arab Emirates. The announcement was made at Red Hat Summit in Atlanta.
The partnership aims to help organizations in highly regulated environments move from experimental AI projects to production-scale deployments while maintaining control over data, compliance, and operational resilience. The collaboration leverages Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies as the foundation for Core42’s sovereign-by-design infrastructure.
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer at Red Hat, said, “Red Hat believes that the only credible path to digital sovereignty is a foundation built on open source. Our collaboration with Core42 reinforces this belief, giving UAE organizations greater choice and control over their AI strategies without compromising innovation. Open, transparent and scalable platforms like Red Hat AI and Red Hat OpenShift form the backbone of sovereign IT. With Core42, we are creating a blueprint for the industry that proves mission-critical AI can be both high-performing and tightly governed.”
Raghu Chakravarthi, executive vice president of engineering and general manager of Americas at Core42, said: “Red Hat’s work on open hybrid cloud technologies has provided a genuinely robust foundation for the full spectrum of sovereign cloud deployments, from fully air-gapped environments through to partially restricted and connected models. That breadth, combined with the stability and maturity of Red Hat’s technologies, is why we see Red Hat as the premier partner for sovereign infrastructure. This collaboration reflects how national-scale AI must be built: with sovereignty, resilience, and long-term control engineered into its foundation.”
The companies outlined four pillars central to their approach: optimized GPU usage; greater workload consistency through automation; a unified service model standardizing internal deployments; and standardized governance aligning workloads with regulatory requirements.
While strengthening digital capabilities in the UAE is an immediate focus of this partnership between Red Hat and Core42, there are plans to expand these offerings globally so that more regions can benefit from resilient infrastructure tailored to local jurisdictional needs.
