At a time when nations are scrambling to secure their technological futures, a $10 million seed round may not sound like a geopolitical tremor, but Mastiska’s raise is exactly that. It in fact shows that sovereign AI is becoming a hardware reality, and the UAE wants to build it from the ground up.
According to EE Times, UAE-based semiconductor startup Mastiska has secured funding primarily from GCC sovereign wealth funds to develop data-center-class inference accelerators. And as reported by the IndexBox Market Intelligence Platform, CEO Suresh Sugumar is explicit about the mission: countries are tired of choosing between U.S. and Chinese suppliers for AI compute. Mastiska wants to break that dependency.
That viewpoint resonates, because the global AI ecosystem is increasingly defined by chokepoints: chips, export controls, and supply-chain loyalties. Sovereign AI is often framed as a data issue, but as Sugumar rightly puts it, “sovereign AI starts with sovereign silicon.”
This is the clearest articulation yet from a GCC founder that hardware sovereignty is the real battleground.
There’s also a personal stake here, and we should care too: if the world’s fastest-growing digital economies remain dependent on two superpowers for compute, their AI ambitions will always be limited by someone else’s politics. Mastiska’s attempt to build a third path, however unpolished or early, is a rare example of a startup refusing to accept that binary.
Of course, building chips in a country with no semiconductor heritage is daunting. The company’s 40-person team is split between model development in Abu Dhabi and a VLSI team in India. Its first products won’t be cutting-edge GPUs but custom FPGA-based PCIe cards using Agilex-7M with up to 96GB HBM, triple what Altera offers. Sugumar admits the initial performance will be modest, but he frames it as a pragmatic beginning: more FPGAs, more rack space, but independence from legacy supply chains.
This is where the sovereign angle becomes unmistakable. Some investors even required Mastiska to open a 60-person office in their home country, effectively tying technology development to national capability building. Sugumar embraced it, arguing it gives local workforces ownership, pride, and political reassurance. It’s an unconventional condition, but it reflects what sovereign AI buyers actually want.
The company’s roadmap is equally unconventional: tape out a RISC-V-based neuromorphic-inspired ASIC, build brain-inspired models, and ensure CUDA compatibility so customers aren’t locked into Nvidia forever. It’s bold, maybe even improbable, but sovereign tech is often born from improbable beginnings.
Mastiska won’t compete in the U.S. or China. Its markets are the GCC, India, Southeast Asia, BRICS, and the Global South, regions that don’t want to be sidelined in the AI revolution.
