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Du and Microsoft sign $544m hyperscale deal

23 April 2025

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Dubai-based Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (Du) has signed a deal to build a AED2bn ($544m) hyperscale data centre in Dubai in partnership with US-headquartered Microsoft.

The US tech firm will be the data centre’s anchor or main tenant.

Dubai Crown Prince Hamdan Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum witnessed the signing of the deal during the Dubai AI Week and announced it on social media on 22 April.

He said the announcement reinforces “Dubai’s leadership in adopting the latest technologies, innovations and digital services”.

Hyperscale data centres are large, often distributed facilities designed for large-scale workloads. They typically comprise thousands of servers and miles of connection equipment to foster high redundancy.

The Du and Microsoft hyperscale data centre will be built and operated at a cost of around AED2bn.

MEED understands that the data centre’s capacity will be delivered in tranches.

Du operates five data centres across the UAE, including three in Dubai and two in Abu Dhabi.

According to MEED Projects data, as of April, an estimated $12bn-worth of data centre construction projects across the GCC are in the planning stage, in addition to over $820m under bid and $7bn under construction.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo

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    Register for MEED’s 14-day trial access 

    MEED celebrates its 69th birthday early next month – a journey characterised by huge transformations and upheavals in the region, but with one constant that MEED has lived by from day one: the goal of helping the world understand what is happening in the Middle East and how to benefit from it. 

    MEED set out all those years ago to offer the business community and government analysts vital information on economic development and commercial opportunities in the region. While the medium might have changed, morphing from newsletter to newsstand to online, MEED has not deviated from this original, unwavering mission. 

    In its early days, MEED was the only comprehensive source of information on the Middle East. Now it is the region’s leading subscription-based online business intelligence service, offering – as it has done done for decades – the latest business news, interspersed with political updates, comment and analysis.

    From newsletter to newstand 

    The first issue of Middle East Economic Digest (MEED) was published on 8 March 1957 as a hand-printed newsletter in the wake of the Suez invasion.

    Former editor the late Abdullah Jonathan Wallace – son of MEED’s founder, Elizabeth Collard (pictured, right) – remembers first working at MEED when he was 15 years old. He would come home from school on Thursday evenings to his mother’s Dickensian office in the then highly unfashionable Covent Garden area of London.

    “My job was to fill the 100-or-so envelopes of the subscribers and take them to the post office. Many people would pass by on press day to help collate and staple the newsletter,” he recalled.

    Collard, a feisty champion of Arab causes and the driving force behind MEED for its first two decades, had the foresight to realise the potential the Middle East offered to Western business. 

    A noted economic analyst on the developing world, Collard produced MEED from her one-roomed office on a hand-cranked Ronco printing machine, with the help of two part-time secretaries. 

    It is no coincidence that the first edition coincided with International Women’s Day, a fitting occasion for a remarkable woman who, by the late 1960s, was brought in to advise Prime Minister Harold Wilson on Middle East affairs. 

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    “Until the oil boom of the early 1970s, when MEED really took off, we were just about making ends meet,” said Wallace. “We could not afford to hire seasoned journalists or experienced commentators and mostly took British graduates straight from university.

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    By the mid-1970s, MEED had become the MEED Group and was in the enviable position of receiving half of its revenue in advance from subscriptions. The other half came from advertising. Rising income streams let to expansion, including the launch of the African Economic Digest and the largest photographic library in the Middle East. A conference division was also started, which broke new ground, holding the Gulf's first banking conference in Bahrain in the late 1970s.

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    By mid-1986, when it was acquired by Emap, MEED had far outgrown its early role of monitoring published news reports. It had a staff of 20 full-time journalists and 12 researchers and newsroom assistants, with more than 30 correspondents overseas, mostly in the Middle East itself.

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