India, UAE Map Out Frameworks for Cooperation in Defense, Tech, Energy

Sarah J · 2026-05-19T12:59:15.000Z

India and the UAE signed a series of agreements during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Abu Dhabi, spanning defense, advanced computing, energy, and logistics. The deals mark a significant deepening of bilateral ties across four strategic sectors. Defense partnership The two sides agreed to a framework for a strategic defense partnership expected to deepen industrial collaboration, technology sharing, innovation cooperation, and regional security coordination. The UAE is increasingly focused on defense localization following recent regional disruptions, with Emirati players shifting capital toward domestic defense manufacturing and strategic capabilities. India brings cost-competitive manufacturing, indigenous capabilities in drones, radar, electronic warfare, and missile technology — including the BrahMos cruise missile — and a deep pool of engineers that the UAE can leverage without building every capability from scratch. AI and sovereign computing The Modi visit helped advance commercial terms for the G42 and Cerebras project to build a national-scale supercomputer for India featuring 8 exaflops of compute capacity — roughly 19 times more powerful than India's entire existing national AI computing capacity. Key details: Abu Dhabi-backed AI firm G42 and India's state-run Centre for Development of Advanced Computing will jointly lead deployment and operations The infrastructure is structured strictly as sovereign computing — walled inside India and operated under Indian governance frameworks, not available for global cloud consumption Planned applications span genomics, energy, and geospatial analytics Energy ADNOC signed two strategic agreements with Indian state energy firms: A pact with Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves that could expand ADNOC's storage capacity to up to 30 million barrels at Indian facilities, while also exploring storage of Indian strategic crude in Fujairah alongside LNG and LPG facilities A second agreement with Indian Oil Corporation to scale LPG supply and trading, building on a 2023 supply deal, with integration of supply and shipping infrastructure between the two companies The broader strategic logic: by holding large physical reserves on both sides of the Arabian Sea, both countries are building a buffer against supply disruptions such as those seen during the Israel-US-Iran conflict.

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India, UAE Map Out Frameworks for Cooperation in Defense, Tech, Energy | SEINET