United Arab Emirates (UAE) telecommunications company Etisalat has announced a new partnership with Microsoft to support future 5G and edge services. Etisalat will be building a new platform on Microsoft's Azure to support smart cities and autonomous systems, among other things. Microsoft already has two data centers running in the UAE.

Microsoft already has a strong edge computing IP portfolio that tends to focus on latency and bandwidth issues, but partnerships such as this may lead to increased financial support in edge-related R&D for the company.

Etisalat already has a multi-access edge computing system for its content delivery network, which it is seeing massive latency reductions from.