After electrifying investors across the Gulf who wrestled to buy its shares, mega-grocery chain Lulu Retail Holdings’ IPO landed today with a thud.

Touted as the UAE’s biggest initial stock sale this year, priced at the top of its marketed range and oversubscribed within an hour of its offering, Lulu fell as much as 2.5% in trading on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. The IPO looked like such a sure bet that Lulu boosted the size of the offering to 30% from its initial plan for a 25% sale.

Lulu’s slow start comes weeks after a $2 billion energy-sector IPO by Oman’s OQ Exploration & Production dropped 8% in its debut, Bloomberg reports. Dubai-based supermarket chain Spinneys, which raised $374 million in May, also had an undramatic debut and continues to trade around the offer price. Both those deals were oversubscribed too.

The Middle East is in the midst of an IPO boom that’s seen firms raise around $10 billion this year. Coming soon is an initial share sale from Talabat, the Middle East unit of Berlin-based Delivery Hero, that could reach a value higher than its parent.

Since its founding in 1973, Lulu has grown into one of the Middle East’s largest hypermarket chains and reported a profit of $192 million last year. It serves over half a million shoppers a day from 240 stores in six countries across the Gulf, and employs more than 50,000 people. 

The IPO boosted India-born founder Yusuff Ali’s net worth to $7.1 billion, cementing his position as the UAE’s second-richest private individual, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Saudi Arabia’s banner NEOM project is getting a management shake-up.

The Public Investment Fund-owned company running the kingdom’s $500 billion development along the Red Sea coast announced the departure on Tuesday of CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr.

The move follows months of reports on rising costs and delays for the megaproject, which aims to build a 110-mile linear city called The Line for 9 million people and has been a centerpiece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 blueprint for modernizing the Saudi economy.

Aiman al-Mudaifer, the head of PIF’s Local Real Estate Division since 2018, was named as NEOM’s acting CEO. “As NEOM enters a new phase of delivery, this new leadership will ensure operational continuity, agility and efficiency to match the overall vision and objectives of the project,” the company said in a statement.

In his role at PIF, Al-Mudaifer oversees all local real estate investments and infrastructure projects, and he is a board member of several prominent companies in the kingdom.

While changing seats at the top, NEOM also announced on Tuesday that it has hired three international consultants for city planning, design and engineering roles connected to The Line. The firms are Austria’s Delugan Missl Associate Architects, San Francisco-based Gensler and Mott MacDonald in the U.K.

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. 

A year after the UAE hosted the annual United Nations environmental summit, the torch passed today to Azerbaijan as officials and activists from 197 nations converged on the capital city of Baku for the two-week event known as COP29.

Opening the conference was COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources, who said the earth is on a “road to ruin” and beseeched delegates to embrace U.N. goals for transition from fossil fuels. “COP29 is the unmissable moment to chart a new path forward for everyone,” he said.

The focus of this year’s climate summit is finance as estimates for the cost of building out clean energy systems, making cities more resilient to extreme weather, and transitioning factories and transportation systems away from fossil fuels run into trillions of dollars, The New York Times reports.

Much of the attention, however, is on what to expect from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a hoax. Also stirring controversy is Azerbaijan’s economic dependence on oil production, which is drawing protests similar to those against the UAE last year at COP28.

Countries will present their updated national climate action plans, which detail how they plan to reduce emissions. At the end of the conference, which closes on Nov. 22, negotiators will try to ratify a final agreement that will include new commitments to address climate change.

More than 100 heads of state and government were planning to attend, including the leaders of Barbados, Finland, Greece, Kenya, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. Skipping the event is U.S. President Joe Biden, as well as the leaders of China, India, Brazil, Britain, Germany and France.

Among the speakers at today’s opening event was Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, who was President of COP28. He is also CEO of Abu Dhabi-based national energy company ADNOC and the UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology.

“I urge you all to prove once again that we can unite, act and deliver,” Al Jaber said. “Let positivity prevail and let it power the process.”

Dealmakers are tallying the numbers from this week’s ADIPEC energy summit in Abu Dhabi, touting a record 205,000 participants and more than $10 billion in contract agreements.

Among the top deals announced at the mammoth conference were ADNOC Drilling’s $223 million acquisition of virtually all of Deep Well Services, TA’ZIZ’s $2 billion infrastructure contract for Al Ruwais Industrial City in Abu Dhabi and BGP’s $490 million contract with ADNOC for its 3D seismic survey in the UAE capital.

ADIPEC’s agenda was set from the start by ADNOC CEO Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, who also serves as UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, Chairman of Masdar and COP28 President. Pointing to the voracious energy needs of AI data centers, Al Jaber said, “No single source of energy is going to be enough to meet this demand.”

In turn, many of the conference’s 1,800 speakers focused on the central themes of harnessing AI in energy production, the shift to sustainable fuels and the rise of the so-called global south in the energy market.

Elsewhere on the MENA conference circuit, the opening of Saudi Arabia’s Biban 24 summit on Thursday, which focuses for small and medium-sized businesses, yielded a total of 17 contracts and preliminary agreements, alongside the launch of government financial initiatives valued at more than $4.8 billion.

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.

Hugging the UAE’s Gulf coast east of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the emirate of Sharjah is prospering as a lower-cost business center within easy proximity to its high-flying neighbors.

While cultivating its own ecosystem of free zones and industry clusters, Sharjah has committed $8 billion to new strategic initiatives over the past two years, drawn in $2 billion in foreign direct investment and created more than 3,000 new jobs. With 1.8 million people, its population is roughly half the size of Dubai’s.

In an interview with The Circuit, Marwan Alichla, Director of Investment Promotion & Support at the emirate’s Invest in Sharjah agency, talks about new efforts to reach small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs. Among the sectors being targeted are advanced manufacturing, agritech, food security, healthcare, culture and tourism, and environmental sustainability.

Positioned at the crossroads of the UAE, Sharjah is using its strategic location, improved infrastructure and a basket of new financial incentives to attract businesses, presenting a compelling argument as the cost of living in neighboring Dubai continues to skyrocket.

With Dubai’s economy booming, how does Sharjah compete?
When we describe Sharjah, the most important points we always highlight are the cost of doing business and then secondly, the improved infrastructure. When it comes to anything investors would require, and when it comes to cost, we have considerable [advantages] over our neighboring cities.

What is your strategy to attract investors and what kind of investors are you looking for?

Mainly our role is to promote investments, to facilitate, guide and support. To promote investment opportunities, we focus on seven different sectors:  advanced manufacturing, agritech, food security, healthcare and wellbeing, culture, tourism, and environmental sustainability.

We also look after innovation and human capital. We have done a lot of research to identify investment opportunities. Let’s talk about advanced manufacturing as an example. We have the largest area for an industrial city. We have more than 33 industrial zones and we are looking for more manufacturers.

What kind of investors approach you?

Sharjah’s economy is based on SMEs. We have more than 66,000 SMEs based in the emirate of Sharjah. When it comes to free zones, we have six different free zones. Sharjah has two main free zones that look after small and medium enterprises. We have the Hamriyah Free Zone and the Sharjah International Free Zone. We have four specialized free zones and specialized clusters. There is Sharjah Healthcare City, the Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park. We also have Sharjah Media City, which looks after the creativity and media sector, so there are opportunities.

Why are SMEs based in Sharjah?

Because we have created an ecosystem for startups. We have three different entities that look only after startups. One of the main ones is the Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center, Shera, which has startup incubators and offers various incentives for startups. The second one is Ruwad, which also looks after Emirati entrepreneurs. We have one government entity that looks after women entrepreneurs, the Sharjah Women’s Business Council, and they have their own programs.

What kind of infrastructure do you have that attracts investors?

In terms of infrastructure, we have created different clusters for different areas. We have a cluster specialized for tech companies, innovation centers and research and development centers. We have a cluster specialized for media, creative industries, and studios. We have a cluster specialized for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, clinics, special clinics and hospitals.

How do you describe Sharjah’s competitive advantages?

Sharjah is in the middle of the UAE. We border all the emirates, and when it comes to logistics, it is the right and ideal location for companies. Sharjah looks after innovation, so you’ll have the right talent pool ready there for you to support. And we have a growing ecosystem, whether it’s for startups, or for small and medium enterprises.

Abu Dhabi’s annual ADIPEC conference opened on Monday, bringing cabinet ministers, oil executives and investors to the UAE capital from around the world to ponder where the energy market is headed.

Kicking off the four-day event was Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, Group CEO of ADNOC, Chairman of Masdar and COP28 President, who pointed to the growing power appetite of AI data centers.

“No single source of energy is going to be enough to meet this demand,” Al Jaber said in an address to the opening session at Abu Dhabi’s ADNEC hall. “We need to integrate renewable energy, nuclear energy and gas in the most cost and carbon-efficient way.”

On the eve of ADIPEC, Al Jaber hosted a gathering for industry leaders called ENACT Majlis that included Microsoft President Brad Smith, Mark Carney, the Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management who serves as U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance; Shell CEO Wael Sawan, BP CEO Murray Auchincloss and Princess Beatrice, founder of the U.K. advisory organization BY-EQ.

Amid OPEC production cuts and pressure to shift away from fossil fuels, CEOs from some of the world’s biggest oil companies at ADIPEC rated conflict in the Middle East and friction between the U.S. and China among their top concerns.

BP CEO Murray Auchincloss said he was worried about protecting personnel and safeguarding supplies because of the geopolitical tensions in the region, Bloomberg reports.

“The conflict in the Middle East is probably the top risk of all right now,” Auchincloss said during a panel discussion on Monday. “We operate across five or six countries in the region — we are worried obviously about the security of our people and the security of energy supplies.”

Shell CEO Wael Sawan pointed to today’s U.S. elections and Donald Trump’s campaign promise to increase tariffs on China. “Longer term, what happens on the U.S.-China axis” is a concern for oil companies, Sawan said at the conference.

Oil companies are concerned, Sawan said, about energy demand, supply chains and the impact that sour U.S.-China relations “could have on the redrawing of the energy complex globally.”

UAE Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Suhail Al Mazrouei, meanwhile, said during his opening remarks at ADIPEC that his country plans to invest up to $54 billion to meet sustainable energy demand over the next six years, aiming to “decarbonise our economy and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.”