Welcome to this week’s Fortune Gulf Brief. We’ll be covering:
- Global players converge at Dubai AI Festival
- QatarEnergy turns to rival U.S. market for LNG supplies
- Apollo acquires 10% stake in Mubadala Capital
- YouTube shopping launches in UAE and Saudi
- And, the three we enjoyed reading this week
Another week, another emirate—and another big AI play. Hello this week from Dubai, where I’ve been attending the third Dubai AI festival in downtown Dubai that ran across Monday and Tuesday. The event brought together more than 20,000 participants from 100 countries, along with 500 investors and 200 exhibitors.
Interestingly, more than 100 Chinese technology companies were exhibiting, alongside a dedicated pavilion showcasing 23 Indian firms specializing in cloud, data center, and GPU infrastructure.
Dubai’s most high-profile AI champion, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, crown prince of Dubai, also made an appearance on the opening day.
Along with touring numerous pavilions, the crown prince announced he was raising the targets for the Dubai AI Campus, aiming to attract more than 1,000 specialized AI companies and create over 5,000 highly skilled jobs by 2030.
The campus has already attracted more than 500 AI companies and over AED 1 billion ($272 million) in private equity and venture capital investment since its launch in May 2024, according to the Dubai government.
It has also helped generate more than 2,000 specialized technology jobs, reaching its original five-year employment targets two years ahead of schedule.
Located in the Dubai International Finance Center (DIFC), the campus offers a dedicated AI licence built on DIFC’s independent legal framework, and facilitates tech partnerships with companies including Amazon Web Services, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Nvidia.
In May this year, Sheikh Hamdan announced that his goal was to make Dubai the world’s leading city for the economic and commercial adoption of agentic AI.
Arguably, the biggest corporate news story to emerge from the festival was the announcement by U.S. tech company Scale AI that it is now open for business in the UAE after establishing an office at the DIFC.
Valued at $29 billion following a major investment led by Meta Platforms in June last year, Scale AI partners with the world’s leading frontier AI labs, developing evaluations and benchmarks to assess the performance and capabilities of advanced AI models. It then applies these to help businesses and governments build, test, and deploy reliable AI systems.
The company already lists Meta, Cisco, Instacart, Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Time, as well as the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army, among its clients.
Speaking at a signing ceremony at the festival, Trevor Thompson, global managing director at Scale AI, noted how the UAE has set a “clear, ambitious vision for AI and is now putting it to work across government and the economy,” adding that the company’s plans will complement the UAE’s digital ambitions.
“Making our home at DIFC is a long-term commitment,” he said. “We are here to help UAE institutions build AI they can trust and use for their most critical use cases and important decisions.”
The importance of data quality and trustworthy AI was an issue highlighted at the Dubai AI Festival by H.E. Younus Al Nasser, CEO of Dubai Data & Statistics Establishment at Digital Dubai, as I expand on in my article here.
“An era in which AI provides trusted information is crucial, as it empowers us to analyze data more effectively and derive meaningful insights,” Al Nasser said. “In turn, this is enabling faster, more reliable, and more informed decision-making across the city of Dubai.”
Earlier this month, Scale AI signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Abu Dhabi-headquartered Presight, a global leader in applied AI, to jointly design, build, and refine high-performing, reliable AI solutions for government and enterprise customers in the UAE, as well as to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the region.
Scale AI already has a track record elsewhere in the Gulf; it has trained or upskilled nearly 6,000 people in Qatar, with applications it developed now integrated into everyday life across the country.
Melissa Hancock
And as ever, thanks for reading, and do keep in touch with your thoughts and ideas.
melissa.hancock@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com