UAE’s Open Innovation AI and NetApp Partner to Advance Sovereign AI Infrastructure
The aim is to help organizations accelerate compute efficiently, make better use of their infrastructure and scale AI while keeping control of their data, models and operating environment.
Open Innovation AI, the UAE-based sovereign AI infrastructure and orchestration company, and NetApp, the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, announced a technology collaboration at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026.
The collaboration aims to identify opportunities to bring together the following;
- Open Innovation AI’s Sovereign AI Fabric: hardware-agnostic software that provisions, orchestrates, secures and operates GPU infrastructure across on-prem, hybrid and air-gapped deployments.
- NetApp Platform: The NetApp Platform is an intelligent, governed foundation that turns distributed enterprise data into trusted, AI-ready knowledge without requiring it to be moved, copied, or consolidated. It enables seamless connections with leading AI or analytics ecosystems, supported by secure, hybrid multi-cloud storage. By delivering near real-time, in-place access to AI-ready data, it reduces the need for constant extraction, transformation, and consolidation.
The two companies intend to explore opportunities to combine AI workload orchestration with AI-ready infrastructure. The aim is to help organizations accelerate compute efficiently, make better use of their infrastructure and scale AI while keeping control of their data, models and operating environment.
The collaboration intends to focus on three areas:
- Exploration of integrated AI infrastructure that pairs the Sovereign AI Fabric with the NetApp Platform across training, inference, retrieval-augmented generation and agentic AI workloads
- High-performance data infrastructure provides near real-time access to AI-ready data and enables accelerated compute resources to operate at full efficiency
Potential sovereign AI deployments for governments, enterprises and neocloud providers across on-prem, hybrid and air-gapped environments
“AI depends on data being available at the speed, scale and reliability that accelerated computing demands. By combining NetApp’s enterprise-grade AI data infrastructure with Open Innovation AI’s sovereign AI orchestration, we can assist customers to build sovereign AI environments where data stays protected, accessible and under their control, while providing near real-time access to AI-ready data across their infrastructure.”
– Jose Petisco, VP strategic markets, NetApp
“Sovereign AI is only as strong as the data foundation beneath it. Governments and most large enterprises are investing in national AI capacity, and that capacity has to run on infrastructure they govern. By combining the NetApp Platform with our Sovereign AI Fabric, we aim to give them an integrated stack to build and operate AI at national scale.”
– Dr. Abed Benaichouche, Co-Founder and CEO, Open Innovation AI
