Saudi leaders are amplifying their message that foreign investment is a two-way street.

As the kingdom’s 27th World Investment Conference kicks off today in Riyadh, Cabinet ministers and other top officials are letting other nations know that putting money into the Saudi economy would be especially appreciated after decades of their being on the receiving end.

In a warm-up statement before the conference, Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih said: “We look forward to welcoming investment leaders from around the world to forge partnerships that will benefit both the kingdom and global economies.”

Saudi Arabia’s inflows of foreign direct investment barely rose in the first half of the year from the same period in 2023, contributing to delays in the target dates for several projects that are part of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 economic overhaul plan.

Among the conference speakers: Saudi Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Alibrahim; Prince Sultan bin Khalid, CEO of the Saudi Industrial Development Fund; Egyptian Investment Minister Hassan Khatib; Alastair King, Lord Mayor of London; Christophe Farnaud, EU Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Nivruti Rai, CEO of Invest India.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s credit rating was raised by Moody’s Investors Service for the first time, citing the kingdom’s efforts to diversify its economy beyond oil.

And Saudi regulators granted licenses to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to set up regional headquarters in Saudi Arabia, a prerequisite for getting government contracts in the kingdom.

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.

Qatar and the UAE are making new efforts to strengthen commercial ties with shared interest in shifting their economies away from dependence on oil and gas.

Khalid Al-Mana, Qatar Development Bank’s Vice President of Enterprise Development, brought executives from 25 companies – including Doha Cables, Delta Corp., Dderve, Q Ceramic and Doha Plastic – on a relation-building trade mission to Dubai this week. Among the group were firms with interests ranging from artificial intelligence and sports technology to construction, steel and food.

In an interview with The Circuit, Al-Mana highlights Qatar’s strategic focus on economic diversification. QDB is making particular efforts to support small and medium-sized businesses, or SMEs, promoting exports and facilitating greater activity by Qatari companies in global markets. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does QDB envision its role evolving in the next decade?
Qatar Development Bank is a government institution that was established in 1997. The purpose of the bank is to promote the private sector and entrepreneurship in the country outside of the oil and gas market. As you know, Qatar is very successful in developing its oil and gas industry and markets worldwide. However, with this comes the challenge of diversification, and it’s the role of the bank to create a more diverse economy.

How does the bank address the finance challenges businesses are facing?

At the bank, we have several arms. One of the arms, of course, is exports and we have a dedicated exports department called Tasdeer. In this department, we look at both developing SMEs through workshops and through our “Go Global” accelerator, which is an award-winning accelerator dedicated to helping local industries export to international markets.

It involves giving them a tool kit for their target markets. So we would try to identify the target market for each SME, and we would develop a tool kit for them to try to penetrate these markets, which goes all the way down to identifying the buyers in these markets so they can deal-make for their exports. This is under the development arm for exports.

In the past, under the finance arm for exports, we were doing only short-term lending through credit insurance and through raw material and bill discounting financing. However, just about a month or two ago, we launched a variety of new products and we have a lot of hopes for these new products to support our private sector and gain more global presence.

What strategies has QDB implemented to enhance Qatar’s global competitiveness?

These products are in line with what leading export credit agencies offer in other countries, such as buyer credit. So we would finance the buyers of Qatari goods and services, and as well, we would provide project finance for Qatari contractors who are seeking to do contracting abroad. Our EPC contractors now have the ability to approach us at Qatar Development Bank and get financing for the projects that they are awarded in foreign countries.

How do you help Qatari companies raise money for international activities?

There are products such as international finance where a Qatari company would like to have a presence in an international market. They would like to either open a branch or extend their businesses in other countries. We now have the ability to finance Qatari companies to expand into international geographies. All these were not available in the past, but currently, they are available with QDB.

Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, sat with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk in ringside seats at the United Fighting Championship’s UFC 309 event on Saturday night in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Al-Rumayyan, who is also Chairman of Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, as well as the PIF-owned LIV Golf tournament and English football club Newcastle, showed up in a photo posted on Musk’s X social media platform, chatting with fellow golf lover Trump while watching the fights.

Al-Rumayyan has been negotiating for the past two years over a proposed merger with the PGA golf tour after luring some of the top professional golfers with paychecks of over $200 million. The two sides, along with Europe’s DP World Tour, reached a framework merger agreement in June 2023 that has yet to be finalized.

The former President’s Trump National Golf Club in Bedminister, N.J., hosted LIV Golf tournaments in 2022 and 2023.

Deep in the Abu Dhabi desert this weekend, foreign ministers, senior government officials and an array of policy experts are gathering behind closed doors for one of the world’s most exclusive diplomatic get-togethers.

The three-day Sir Bani Yas Forum, hosted by UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, opened Friday with speeches, panel talks and high-level shmoozing opportunities galore.

The affair, which focuses on the most pressing political, economic and security issues, is conducted under so-called Chatham House rules that prevent public attribution of remarks to allow for more free-spirited expression.

While the media is kept at bay and the Sir Bani Yas website stops dead at the login page, a few participants have made their presence known through reports on their national news agencies.

The most prominent of them is Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who announced his landing in Abu Dhabi on Thursday with a report on TASS. Also disclosing their participation were Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos of Cyprus and Mohammad Ishaq Dar, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Pakistan.

The top-tier confab is named for Sir Bani Yas Island in western Abu Dhabi, home to a bird sanctuary, nature reserve and several significant archeological sites. The name originates from the Bani Yas tribe, who first inhabited the land that became the emirate of Abu Dhabi.

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.