UAE data center firm Khazna sets sights on Saudi Arabian market

Khazna, the Dubai data center company backed by G42 and Microsoft, is preparing to make a major foray into Saudi Arabia.

CEO Hassan Alnaqbi tells Bloomberg that the company projects taking at least 25% of the kingdom’s market share as demand booms for power-hungry AI servers.

He said Khazna has 71% of the UAE’s current data center capacity and is looking beyond its home country with new funding from Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund and U.S. private equity firm Silver Lake.

Alnaqbi told The Circuit in an October 2024 interview that Khazna is investing in solar power and other sustainable energy sources to help fuel its data centers.

Du, Microsoft team up on $545M ‘hyperscale’ data center in Dubai

Dubai’s telecom company, du, is collaborating with Microsoft to build a $545 million “hyperscale” data center.

Microsoft will be the primary tenant of the center, which will be built in stages.

Hyperscale centers are facilities used to meet the huge data and storage demands of AI and cloud computing services.

Currently, du operates five data centers across the UAE.

The project was unveiled on Tuesday by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai, UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister and Chairman of the Dubai Future Foundation.

“Data is the wealth of the future and the foundation of technological progress,” he said.

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.

Microsoft bet on ‘edge’ computing brings AI closer to Mideast users

Microsoft, which invested $1.5 billion last year in Abu Dhabi’s G42 artificial intelligence firm, is rolling out new AI products tailored to customers across the Middle East and Africa.

Overseeing the campaign is Chris Papaphotis, who was in the UAE this week to launch the company’s Copilot+ series of Surface PCs, which integrate so-called “edge” AI technology that runs on users’ computers rather than on distant cloud-based servers.

“AI gets born in the cloud, but it will be used in the edge,” Papaphotis said in an interview with The Circuit.

The new PCs have been adapted to the region’s business and government market with bolstered Arabic-language capacities, said Papaphotis, 53, who started with Microsoft almost 30 years ago in his native Greece. Now he covers 109 countries as Senior Director for Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa of Device Partner Sales.

Microsoft, the world’s second-largest company after Apple, plans to invest approximately $80 billion globally this year in AI-enabled data centers, which include facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and South Africa.

The firm is also a co-investor with BlackRock and Abu Dhabi’s MGX in the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, which launched last September with the goal of raising $100 billion in private equity capital.

The interview with Papaphotis has been edited for length and clarity.

Where are Microsoft’s investments concentrated now in the Middle East and Africa region?

Both in the cloud and on the edge. It’s an area that we are interested in. As you know, we have strategic relationships with G42, for example, significant investments from Microsoft as well, as well as investing in data centers across the region — Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and so forth. It is something that Microsoft invests heavily in. We know that the Middle East and Africa are opportunities for us. It’s great to see the governments being so interested because they understand that this is a kind of technology that, by investing now, you can leapfrog and shape the future. For example, creating Arabic LLMs (large language models), is really a keystone for that.

Why is edge AI becoming so important to the company?

Today, AI is a technology that was born in the cloud. It means that there was a lot of data and what we call the large language models that have been compiled through very huge data centers. We all know about the big investments in this area. Currently, a lot of people experience AI through this lens, meaning that you go, let’s say, to ChatGPT or Co-Pilot, and you ask a question, then it goes up in the cloud, and it crunches it. However, people understand that as we move along, AI will become much more of a personal assistant. And in order to really unlock the value that it can bring to you, it needs to have access to personal details. For reasons of privacy and security, it makes a lot of sense to actually have it on the edge. So maybe it’s a long-winded answer saying that AI gets born in the cloud, but will be used in the edge. And a lot of computing needs to exist in the edge to be able to do this for you and become very personalized and to suit your needs.

Q: What are the biggest opportunities and challenges you see for combining cloud and edge?

The truth of the matter is that there is really a generational shift in technology. AI is here to stay. It’s not like something that is just a fad. It will truly ingrain every single thing we do in our lives, from self-driving cars to AI agents, that we will be able to command and have tens or hundreds of them for personal or work tasks to enhance human productivity. I think we’ll look back in history and say this is great. Of course, it does take a responsible way to use it. It still has some limitations – for example, hallucinations and producing results that are not accurate. It’s important for us to understand how to use it properly to our benefit and understand the limitations so that we can sidestep them and have them under control. That’s why in Microsoft, we call them Co-Pilot. We feel that humans should always be pilots, and then there should be co-pilots next to us, giving us assistance, but we should always maintain control.

How has the experience of working for Microsoft changed over your three decades with the company?

I mean, it’s crazy. Honestly, I feel that it’s like working for a startup, although I have been working for so many years. And the reason is that in a startup, you have the sense of possibilities of something new that the whole world can actually see. If you think about it, we started with a vision of having one PC on every desk, and now it’s one AI per person across the world or even multiple ones depending on the different roles that you have. I think we’re just in the very beginning. Things have evolved tremendously, and to be quite honest, it’s part of the excitement that we don’t know where it’s going to lead us, but for sure there are going to be infinite possibilities.

Musk’s xAI, Nvidia join with MGX in artificial intelligence fund

The UAE’s biggest tech firms are capitalizing on White House support to tighten partnerships with America’s leaders in the booming industry of artificial intelligence.

A consortium created last year by Abu Dhabi investment fund MGX, Microsoft and BlackRock to finance power-hungry AI data centers welcomed chipmaker Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI to the group on Wednesday.

Expansion of the top-level venture came amid the Washington visit by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE National Security Advisor and Chairman of MGX and a constellation of other tech companies, who dined at the White House this week with President Donald Trump.

Sheikh Tahnoon, who held a meeting with Musk through a video feed on Wednesday, has been accompanied through the trip by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the MGX Vice Chairman and CEO of the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund. Also on the visit is Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the ADNOC national oil company and the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. Peng Xiao, CEO of the Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42, joined the call with Musk.

Among the other meetings in his U.S. rounds, Sheikh Tahnoon said he “explored opportunities for collaboration and investment” with Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

ADQ, meanwhile, another Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, agreed to invest a combined $5 billion in a partnership with U.S-based Energy Capital Partners to build power stations for data centers and AI projects – with the investment eventually reaching $25 billion.

The announcement came as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, Calif., that the industry is preparing for a massive leap in building data centers and chip manufacturing plants with accompanying energy demand.

“Over the next several years, we’re going to be building giant AI factories,” he said. Not normal AI factories … ones you see from space,” Huang said.

Abu Dhabi’s Multiply eyes $1B divestment from PAL Cooling

Abu Dhabi’s Multiply Group may be getting ready to divest from its PAL Cooling unit, which keeps the UAE capital’s skyscrapers at tolerable temperatures under the Gulf’s sizzling sun.

The firm, a unit of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed’s International Holding Co., could raise as much as $1 billion if it’s put up for sale, Bloomberg reports.

PAL’S cooling technology involves pumping chilled water into buildings from centralized plants.

Multiply is working with Standard Chartered on the sale, which is at an early stage and has drawn interest from both regional and international investors, the news agency said.

Multiply went public more than three years ago and has investments in companies ranging from Getty Images to Rihanna’s lingerie company.

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.

Bill Gates talks up AI prospects in round of Abu Dhabi appearances

Bill Gates crisscrossed Abu Dhabi this week as an evangelist for the many applications of AI technology.

The Microsoft founder and philanthropist came to the UAE’s capital to participate in an event showcasing the benefits artificial intelligence can offer farmers and agricultural industries, particularly in Africa.

Together with Mariam Almheiri, head of International Affairs at the UAE Presidential Court, Gates discussed progress on the $200 million partnership formed between the UAE and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai. Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 to fund data centers and work on AI projects.

Among the projects Gates highlighted at the event on Wednesday was AgriLLM, which focuses on fine-tuning the open-source Falcon large language model to improve agricultural research and development knowledge. AgriLLM aims to synthesize complex agricultural research into accessible, actionable insights for farmers and extension workers.

Gates also taught a 30-minute “masterclass” for students at the CNN Academy Abu Dhabi and several UAE universities, which focused on how AI and other emerging technologies can address global challenges such as disease eradication, climate change, and food security in underserved regions.

Gates met separately with billionaire developer Hussein Sajwani, Chairman of DAMAC Properties, to talk about charitable activities.

UAE’s Falcon Mamba breaks new ground in artificial intelligence

At a time that Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion with the UAE’s G42 artificial intelligence firm and Nvidia is consulting on new computer chip development, the Gulf state is turning into a regional research hub for commercial applications of AI technology. 

Leading much of the UAE’s international collaboration is Dr. Hakim Hacid, Chief Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute’s Artificial Intelligence and Digital Science Research Center. It was in his lab, part of the Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Center, that scientists developed Falcon Mamba, a new platform for AI architecture that can process massive amounts of data and was launched in August.

In an interview with The Circuit, Dr. Hacid describes Falcon Mamba’s ability to handle enormous  files without overloading memory capacity. The unique design makes it faster and more reliable for tasks that involve heavy data, such as analyzing video content and large-scale scientific data, where existing models struggle. He also explains how the government-owned research center decides where to devote its resources.

What is the scope of the Technology Innovation Institute’s research activities?

We are targeting the different priority sectors of the UAE. So you have transportation, healthcare, education, defense and security. Anything that is related to or is matching and can be mapped to these priority sectors, we go with it, definitely.

How do you decide that this is an important technology that you want to invest in?

Of course we do some research in the background to understand the potential of the technology. We are in the R&D context so we also take risks from time to time. This is what happened, for example, with generative AI. We have a lot of researchers who are capable of understanding the future of such technology and the potential. So, it’s not something that I would say is deterministic, but it’s more about mixing the expertise, the technical expertise, and also the business understanding of the environment and the ecosystem that helps us to decide.

What is Falcon Mamba and why did you decide to work on it?

You see we have different architectures on the ground. So the main architecture that everybody is following is the transformer-based, so all the models are built on a transformer-based architecture. We believe that we did not yet have the full potential of these models. So we need to look into how we could actually somehow open up this potential, so we have the hypothesis that the quality and the performance of this model is related to the data. So we work a lot on the data, but then on the architecture side, most of the things have been done. So most of the model providers, they have more or less the same things, where we can change here and there, few things soon. We thought that it would be interesting also to look into different ways and explore different architectures completely. So this is what we have done with the Falcon Mamba which is not built on the transformer side. It’s actually transformer-free. There is no transformer inside so far, and it actually relies on what we call the state space models that will allow you to actually control or to learn the changes of states for your architecture, which gives you actually more sort of flexibility and better management of all the resources that you have.

What are the applications for Falcon Mamba?

When you have a large amount of data that you need to handle, for example, when it comes to video and audio, if you have a one-hour or two-hour audio or video, it’s much, much bigger than the text that you have. Mamba is good for managing memory. Wherever you go large, it doesn’t go exponentially large when it comes to memory. So the target is when you have time series, videos, for example, audio, and it’s like genomes, for example, will be also a good application. 

You launched in August and what has happened with Falcon Mamba? 

We have a lot of people who are using it because it was the first big model that was, let’s say, actually launched using this architecture. So a lot of people are using it. A lot of people are taking it and fine-tuning it for several sorts of applications. From our side, we have been working, actually, on a bigger model than the one that we had before, with a better architecture, because of the opportunity of building that allowed us to learn a lot of things when it comes to the Mamba architecture. So there is a model that will be coming, hopefully soon.

What are the ongoing trends within the AI sphere that you have witnessed and in which you’re putting in some resources?

Well, we have, of course, the reasoning part that’s very important. So we want to have models that can actually think, that can reason on the questions and the prompt they receive. So before giving you the answer, it’s not just a matter of probabilistic calculations on the next token. But we need, we want also to integrate a way of thinking and reasoning to constrain the generation itself. You also have the stream of the multi-modality that is following. We continue in that we have proposed the model that handles images, understands images. Now we are working on things related to video, for example, and we should get this kind of thing soon. There is also the model safety. We invest a lot on that. So now our models are much more safer, so they are able to understand when a prompt will lead to a risk for the user, for example. So we are able to let the model know that it shouldn’t answer the questions that may result in harming the user or any human being.

How do you advise clients and potential clients on what to use when it comes to AI? 

I think it’s a matter of trying and failing so we learn from these things. We don’t have a deterministic approach, again, to consume and use this AI. It’s a matter of getting the AI trying different ways of making it usable in your context. And then, of course, give the time and make sure that the people who control the data, for example, are part of this process, because the data is the key at the end of the day. And if these people are not, let’s say, confident, or they are not comfortable in having this kind of AI, it will be complicated to put it in this.