Core42 walks tightrope between AI growth and global regulation

As Core42 rolls out its Nvidia-powered AI cloud platform, senior executives say the Abu Dhabi-based tech company is trying to grow internationally without tripping over tightening regulatory frameworks.

Chief Financial Officer Neha Gupta said the firm “made an intentional decision” to enter the U.S. and European markets despite the added compliance challenges. “The industry is evolving practically on a daily basis,” she told The Circuit.

Sitting alongside Gupta on the sidelines of this week’s Gitex Global 2025 conference in Dubai, Core42 General Counsel Roopal Jobanputra described the partnership between the two women as a balancing act. “Neha drives growth, and I make sure we grow responsibly,” she said. “The key is finding equilibrium between expansion and compliance.”

Core42, a subsidiary of AI conglomerate G42, provides customers, including governments, hospitals, airlines and banks, the computer power they need to scale up AI transformation. Among its clients are the Abu Dhabi Health Department, Etihad Airways and the ADNOC oil company. G42 is owned by the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund and investors that include private equity firm Silver Lake, Microsoft and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio.

At GITEX, Core42 unveiled its self-service AI Cloud platform, which gives enterprises quick access to high-performance computing while meeting so-called data sovereignty requirements that vest authority over data within their home countries. 

Gupta said the model is built around partnerships. She described three approaches: bundling Core42’s technology with partner offerings, working through resellers across multiple countries and offering instant access via an on-demand platform launched this year.

“We’re building an ecosystem where partners can bring their own industry use cases on top of our AI infrastructure,” she said.

Jobanputra said compliance frameworks are embedded from the start of each collaboration to reflect regional laws such as the EU’s GDPR, the U.S. Cloud Act and the UAE’s data protection rules. She said the company maintains a consistent baseline to ensure “customers are comfortable and confident wherever we operate.”

Core42’s proprietary Regulated Technology Environment, or RTE, was developed in the UAE to localize data and can be replicated in other jurisdictions. Jobanputra said it also acts as a “sovereign wrapper” for public cloud services like Microsoft Azure, letting government clients meet requirements on data residency and security.

Both executives said the fast pace of AI regulation creates uncertainty but also opportunity. Jobanputra said Core42 supports “co-regulation,” working with governments to align technology development with evolving rules. Gupta said customer demand has been strong in the United States, Europe and the Gulf region for solutions that deliver “quick, seamless access” without bypassing compliance.

“We see opportunities to co-develop frameworks that serve both the customer’s and provider’s best interests,” Gupta said. The company expects adoption of its on-demand platform to accelerate by year’s end.

Saudi Arabia, Merak Capital launch $80 million fashion fund

Riyadh-based Merak Capital has set up an $80 million private equity fund to support the fashion industry in Saudi Arabia, anchored by the kingdom’s Cultural Development Fund.

The Fashion Fund will invest across the industry, supporting Saudi labels, as well as beauty brands, e-commerce and technology companies working with apparel.

Saudi Arabia hosted its first ever fashion shows in 2018 and has since established Riyadh Fashion Week and Red Sea Fashion Week.

The sector is poised for significant growth, with fashion and luxury expected to hit $42 billion by 2028, according to industry tracker Fashion Futures.

Mubadala backs Anaconda in $150 million funding round

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Capital was among the investors in a $150 million funding round for U.S.-based AI startup Anaconda, which valued the company at about $1.5 billion.

Anaconda’s open-source platform provides secure versions of Python-based coding packages used by businesses to build and run AI systems.

The Series C funding round, led by Insight Partners, will accelerate global expansion and new AI features, while giving early employees a chance to cash out.

It comes amid intense competition among enterprise AI software companies, with the Python programming language dominating.

Mubadala’s key AI investments include UAE powerhouse G42 and space tech company Space42.

Meituan eyes Dubai Marina as it expands drone delivery services

Beijing-based company Meituan is expanding its drone delivery service in Dubai, targeting the city’s iconic waterfront.

The Chinese retail and food delivery firm will add up to three new drone routes in the second half of 2025, building on the momentum of its initial launch in December.

With plans to operate visibly along Dubai Marina, Meituan is betting on the emirate’s tech-forward ecosystem to showcase its autonomous delivery capabilities, Bloomberg reports.

“It will be very highly visible. It will be on the waterfront of the Dubai Marina,” Vice President Yinian Mao told Bloomberg in an interview.

Abu Dhabi introduces Falcon Arabic to compete in AI race

Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has launched Falcon Arabic, a powerful new Arabic-based large language model, as the UAE vies to stay in the consumer AI race.

The new LLM is trained across both Modern Standard Arabic and dialects, and TII claims that it matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size, Bloomberg reports.

The U.S. and China are increasingly dominating the competition to develop the world’s most powerful AI models, leaving countries like the UAE fighting to keep up.

Earlier this month, it was reported that TII’s flagship Falcon model had fallen behind in the rankings and user adoption, while G42, which backed another system called Jais, had shifted focus to customizing models from companies like OpenAI instead of developing its own.

HSBC tops Standard Chartered in Mideast investment banking fees

A jump in dealmaking across the Middle East and North Africa has generated an estimated $1 billion in investment banking fees so far this year – a 27% boost over the first nine months of 2023, with HSBC leading the pack.

London-based HSBC earned $80.4 million in fees during the first three quarters of 2024, or 7.8% of the total investment banking pool, Zawya reports, citing LSEG Deals Intelligence.

Coming second in the banking field’s league tables was Standard Chartered with $56.5 million in fees, followed by First Abu Dhabi Bank with $56 million. The highest amount of investment banking fees were generated from Saudi Arabia ($470.7 million), followed by the UAE ($395.9 million), Qatar ($45 million), Kuwait ($41.7 million) and Egypt ($25.1 million).

The largest deal in the MENA region during the first nine months of 2024 was ADNOC’s $14.8 billion takeover offer for German chemicals company Covestro, according to the LSEG data. The largest during the third quarter was UAE clean energy firm Masdar’s offer to buy Spain’s Saeta Yield from Brookfield Renewable for $1.4 billion.

Eager Israeli food startups shrug off Beyond Meat’s market woes

When Beyond Meat Inc. went public in May 2019, investor excitement over the sizzle of its plant-based burgers sent the stock soaring, giving the California-based company a market value of almost $14 billion. Three years later, the shares have fallen more than 90%, fueling concern about whether consumer demand for meat alternatives will live up to the expectations they’ve generated.

In Israel, home to a thriving vegan culinary culture and more than 400 food-tech startups, the prevailing outlook is optimistic. While several Israeli companies are producing plant-based versions of beef, chicken and fish – as well as eggs and dairy products – another frontier of so-called cultivated meat, which is made from animal cells grown in a lab, is gaining traction.

“Plant-based meat as it is today won’t get people to stop eating meat,” Guy Nevo Michrowski, CEO of Israel’s ProFuse Technology, told The Circuit. “The only thing that will get them to switch is something that really tastes like meat and that is what is already happening.”

ProFuse raised $2.5 million last month in a funding round led by New York’s Green Circle. Investors included Tnuva, one of Israel’s top two food producers; beverage-maker Tempo; OurCrowd, a Jerusalem-based platform for crowdfunded venture capital investment; and Newport Beach, Calif.-based Finistere Ventures.

Until now, high cost and lengthy production time have been the main problems in making cultivated meat marketable. If these can be solved, cultivated meat can take off exponentially as demand continues to grow, Michrowski said, citing projections that meat consumption will double by 2050 as the world’s population reaches 10 billion. Despite the initial hype, he said, companies like Beyond Meat and Redwood City-based Impossible Foods have not produced a satisfactory substitute for steak-lovers. Michrowski himself is a vegan for ideological reasons, but says he has no problem eating cultivated meat.

ProFuse’s technology, which nurtures the cells in a nourishing liquid, was developed over six years of research at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science. The process can potentially enable the large-scale manufacture of meat in bioreactors at a cost similar to producing farm-grown beef, chicken and pork, Stu Strumwasser, managing director of Green Circle, said last month after the new investment was announced. ProFuse’s method “may substantially accelerate that process and thus fundamentally change the calculus for the commercialization of lab-grown meat,” he said.

Another Israeli company working on cultivated meat is Aleph Farms, which gained fame for producing the world’s first lab-grown steak. With actor Leonardo Dicaprio among its investors, Aleph Farms raised $105 million last year to bring its steaks to market by 2023. The funding round was led by DisruptAD, the venture capital platform of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ,  and the Growth Fund of Greenwich, Conn.-based L Catterton, the largest global consumer-focused private equity firm. The company’s process of cultivating cells extracted from cattle was developed at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology and supported by Strauss Group, Israel’s other top food manufacturer.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which import the vast majority of their food, have been developing partnerships with Israeli food-tech companies since the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the two Gulf states. Aleph Farms and DisruptAD have discussed building a manufacturing facility in Abu Dhabi to produce cultivated meat products and sell them across the Gulf.

The alternative protein market as a whole drew $1.75 billion in investment in the first half of 2022, according to the Good Food Institute Israel. Of that, $320 million was invested in Israeli companies, second only to the U.S. Consumer demand for plant-based alternatives (PBA) to meat, however, have stalled in the U.S., according to a report by Deloitte published in September.

“The addressable market may be more limited than many thought,” the report said. Dramatically improved taste in recent years unlocked new interest in PBA meat. But the portion of the U.S. population open to trying (and repeat buying) it may already have reached a saturation point.” Among the reasons cited for the halt in market growth were the higher price compared to meat and “cultural resistance to a product some view as ‘woke,’ the report said.

Until its shares started their steady slide in July 2021, Beyond Meat looked like a sure winner. The stock, which reached a peak of $234.90 in 2019, and was trading as high as $178 in 2021, has fell last week to a low of $12.76.

Introduced in 2012, it offered an enticing combination – a completely plant-based product that looked like meat, could be cooked like meat, and tasted more like meat than any previous product. The company took off first with strips of fake chicken, then created products emulating beef and pork. There were rollouts in Whole Foods, and a major partnership with  McDonalds dubbed the McPlant burger, which was discontinued this year in the U.S. 

But since the 2019 IPO, Beyond Meat has failed to meet sales targets. Part of the problem was the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on restaurants, many of which closed for months during the pandemic, and the company’s shift in focus to supermarkets. One bizarre incident that may indicate the level of tension at Beyond Meat was the arrest of Chief Operating Officer Douglas Ramsey in September after he got into a fight in an Arkansas parking garage with another driver and bit the man’s nose. Ramsey was suspended by the company.

Among other Israeli companies that have drawn large international investment is Redefine Meat, which uses a proprietary 3-D printing process to turn plant-based proteins into steaks. The Rehovot, Israel-based company, whose logo is an upside-down cow, raised $135 million in January in a funding round led by Tel Aviv-based Hanaco Ventures and London’s Synthesis Capital.

SavorEat, an Israeli company that trades on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange features a robot chef making plant-based dishes to order, is rolling out its technology on U.S. college campuses. The machine it sells allows food operators to “customize the meal based on level of doneness as well as fat and protein level,” Barak Orenstein, vice president of marketing,  told The Circuit . “This has not been done before.”

Despite Beyond Meat’s market plunge, Israeli companies see a bright future for meat substitutes and expect even more companies to join the race for the perfect alternative steak.

“If the megatrends of health and wellness and sustainability persist, the foundations of the industry will remain strong,” Orenstein said.