Google injects $6 billion into UAE’s economy with AI push
The UAE’s expanding ties with Silicon Valley are paying dividends for the economy amid new joint investments in artificial intelligence.
Among the major contributors to the Gulf state’s economic growth last year was Google, whose products contributed $6 billion to GDP, according to a report released today by Public First, a London-based consulting firm.
The search company’s tools, particularly in advertising, mapping and through its YouTube and Gemini AI units, fueled growth in business and individual productivity, said the economic impact report, which was commissioned by Google.
“The report reflects our investment in accelerating the country’s ambitious journey towards a diversified, AI-powered economy,” Anthony Nakache, Google’s Managing Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in the report’s introduction.
In the UAE, 63% of adults surveyed said they had used Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, and 90% of those users said it improved their productivity. More than two-thirds said Gemini was easier to use in Arabic than other AI chatbots.
The UAE plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to establish itself as a world leader in AI infrastructure, establishing partnerships through its G42 tech firm and MGX investment fund with firms including Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAi and Oracle.
Abu Dhabi’s annual Culture Summit embraces AI for the arts
Abu Dhabi’s Culture Summit is focusing this year on the disruption and promise of artificial intelligence in the art world.
Kicking off at the Manarat Al Saadiyat art gallery on Sunday – not far from the Louvre Abu Dhabi on the island that contains the capital city’s developing cultural district – the three-day event carries the theme, “Culture for Humanity and Beyond.”
AI is pushing artists, curators, and programmers to rethink how they integrate technology into their work, said David Korins, the set designer for Broadway blockbuster “Hamilton.”
The creative world ought to embrace the emerging technology as a new layer of storytelling, rather than fearing it, he said.
AI ethicist and former Google X executive Mo Gawdat pointed out in a keynote speech that AI has achieved decision-making autonomy, which he called a pivotal moment for humanity.
Gawdat advised a human-centered approach to guiding the future of AI use, much like raising “a child with special powers.”
UAE pushes artificial intelligence use in all government agencies
The UAE is amping up the use of artificial intelligence in all aspects of government.
Speaking at Dubai’s AI retreat 2025 on Sunday, Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for AI, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications, said all departments will be evaluated on the effectiveness of how they use the emerging technology, The National reports.
“We don’t want to leverage artificial intelligence just for the sake of AI,” Al Olama said. “We want to ensure that the application actually improves the quality of life of citizens in the UAE and in Dubai specifically.”
The minister spoke during the AI event’s opening session at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. The retreat brings together more than 1,000 AI experts, policymakers, and executives from companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and IBM.
Among those participating in the week’s activities are Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Ruler of Dubai and UAE Prime Minister and Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi, UAE Minister of Cabinet Affairs and Managing Director of the Dubai Future Foundation.
Delegations from more than 100 countries have come to the city for a deep dive into AI technology.
Presight’s data analytics help UAE’s biggest companies conquer AI fears
As the UAE carves out a role in developing artificial intelligence tools with Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, Abu Dhabi-based Presight is harnessing big data analytics to help governments, energy producers and other industrial giants sharpen their performance.
The $3.5 billion company got off the ground less than three years ago as a subsidiary of G42, the UAE’s umbrella AI firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed’s Royal Group and backed by the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund. Now, after a March 2023 IPO, it’s expanding through acquisitions, most recently buying a majority stake in AIQ, the data arm of national oil company ADNOC.
In an interview with The Circuit on the sidelines of the World Governments Summit in Dubai, Presight CEO Thomas Pramotedham said the company aims to decipher AI for some of the largest state-owned enterprises in the UAE and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa while breaking down hurdles to wider adoption. Before moving to Abu Dhabi, he was CEO of Esri Singapore, which helped build the city-state’s Smart Nation program using data analytics and digital know-how to improve government services.
“We fear something we don’t understand,” Pramotedham said. “We will continue to evolve AI but also bring other technologies and apply them in an impactful way, where the technology truly hits the ground running.”
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Circuit: How would you describe Presight’s mission and where do you see areas for growth?
Thomas Pramotedham: In my view, we’re definitely on the cusp of a transformation era. Presight has a very strong foundation in national platforms, applied technology, applied big data analytics and smart cities. And then, you have generative AI coming in for disruption.
We’re a company based in the UAE, focusing on the Global South – countries in Africa, Central Asia, and ASEAN. We focus on applying technology. That’s a key part of it. I believe AI will become more accessible, especially with recent advancements in open-source models that are more efficient.
Presight always operates on a national platform – we’re not really a B2B company. We work with large state-owned enterprises, primarily in Abu Dhabi, as their digital transformation and AI partner. That’s the trajectory I see. We will continue to evolve AI but also bring other technologies and apply them in an impactful way—where the technology truly hits the ground running.
Where does Presight fit in with the global energy transition?
There are two parts of the story. Either the rise of AI, everyone’s talking about where we are going to find the energy to support computing and no less so, buying the chips and creating the infrastructure. So that’s one part of the angle that we put in. The second part is this: the move from current energy transition into renewables is a journey that is taken. Our AIQ venture with ADNOC is really driven by ADNOC ‘s vision of AI in energy and energy for AI. What do I mean by that? AI is going to help the current energy operation transform, optimize, and therefore, they should be able to do more with less – and how do you achieve the requirement that is needed without an increased carbon footprint.
Then on the other side, [with Presight’s power-generation] “IntelliGrid” businesses, it’s really a transition of digitization or transmission and distribution network. So a smart grid, when you put the two together, what we’re expecting to see is soon traditional and renewable energy will interact. So you get two sources of energy providing, whether it’s compute or powering a city. Then what you really need is microgrids that are driven by AI algorithms that regulate this transmission. So really minimizing the wastage of electricity or optimizing, you know, how individual households consume electricity.
What are the key challenges in deploying AI at scale in critical infrastructure sectors like energy?
We are seeing a higher adoption of AI. We did for ADNOC, we launched the ENERGYai Large Language Model. It’s a generative AI workflow that helps optimize reservoir selections, seismic cube analysis, and in many ways, through AI automation, improves ADNOC’s upstream functions and workflows. So, helping energy companies optimize for better energy production.
On the city side, on the consumption of it, to work with cities, like what we’re doing now with Azerbaijan and many other countries, is really introducing a smart grid into the transmission networks that a country has. So it’s the adoption of the two. Of course, not every country. Power is still an issue. Electricity is not accessible to almost 700 million people around the world. But really, how do we bring this transition and make it available to developing or underdeveloped countries? It’s really one of the key ways to bridge the electricity divide – not just the digital divide, but the electricity divide.
How have you been actually limiting the electricity divide?
One is the work we’re doing with Azeri Gas. So, smart meter digitization is a piece of work that I think will continue. Through that, the optimization of transmission and distribution of utilities in the country can be improved. So that’s the work we do with IntelliGrid, our joint venture.
For, like I said, the acquisition of AIQ, it’s creating base models that can help not just large national oil and international oil companies but also small and medium oil companies optimize their operations. Using the models that we’re building with ADNOC, the model is trained on AdNoc, it’s applied to ADNOC. But the foundation model can be taken out to help a medium-sized oil company improve their production, improve their operations.
What impact will your work for ADNOC have on the broader industry?
I think ADNOC is an example of a large energy language model with agentic workflows that is converging with what we’ve seen in the last 18 months. So in 2023 and 2024, you heard a lot about large language models, and then last year, you heard a lot about agentic models. Large language models are foundation models that support broad queries. But when you specialize down to industrial language, that’s where agentic workflows come in.
So I could do the same at ADNOC and financial services. I could do it for the supply chain. I could do it for transportation, and what will happen is you get AI trained in a particular vertical, and from then, you develop different agents that help that vertical optimize itself. For example, the requirements I need in port operations and supply chains are quite different from the models I need in regular multimodal transportation.
Baidu’s Li tells Dubai summit AI costs pushing China to innovate
Inside Dubai’s luxurious Madinat Jumeirah resort at the World Governments Summit, some 6,000 participants were scrambling between hotel ballrooms on Tuesday to see a parade of government and corporate leaders talk about the future of the earth.
Another 1.5 million tuned in on the web feed. Topping the agenda in one session after another was how to address the promise and threats presented by artificial intelligence.
Robin Li, CEO of China’s Baidu talked about how the high costs of AI development have forced the world’s second-largest economy to find new computing solutions, including DeepSeek, which has come up with vastly cheaper AI models than those developed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
“You just don’t know when and where innovations come from,” Li said in an onstage conversation with Omar Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications.
Kristalina Georgieva, the Bulgarian economist who serves as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said the world is at an important juncture that will determine whether AI turns into a great story or a nightmare. “There are many, many unknowns,” she sighed.
Adding a touch of glamor on Monday night was a star-studded event at the Museum of the Future, where many of the WGS delegates attended TIME magazine’s Impact Awards Gala, which featured appearances by Grimes, the artist, singer and ex-life partner of Elon Musk, as well as video artist Refik Anadol and musician Arqam Al Abri.
Topping the bill on Wednesday will be Oracle’s Larry Ellison, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who will deliver a keynote address in the morning. Google’s Sundar Pichai and Goldman Sachs’ Jared Cohen will speak in separate sessions on the future of tech.
G42 board plots AI strategy with Microsoft’s Smith at the table
G42, the Abu Dhabi technology firm backed by the emirate’s sovereign wealth and Microsoft, is cooking up plans for its new investments in artificial intelligence next year.
At a board meeting on Thursday led by G42 Chairman Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, who is also the UAE’s Deputy Ruler and National Security Advisor as well as Chairman of ADIA and International Holding Co., the company worked out its growth strategy for 2025.
Among those around the board table were Mubadala CEO Khaldoon Al Mubarak, G42 CEO Xiao Peng, G42 Group Counsel Marty Edelman, Microsoft President and Vice Chairman Brad Smith, and Bridgewater Associates Founder Ray Dalio, Etisalat Chairman Jassem Al Zaabi and Silver Lake Technology CEO Egon Durban.
“We emphasized the Group’s crucial role in shaping the future of global technology and making innovation a cornerstone for a more prosperous future globally,” Sheikh Tahnoon said in an Instagram post.
As G42 grows, Saudi Arabia is planning a new AI initiative with as much as $100 billion in backing as it seeks to compete with the UAE, Bloomberg reports. A tech hub being built by the Saudi Public Investment Fund and Google may serve as the starting point for the project, the news agency said.
