Saudi Aramco has found a new home in Asia for some of its oil, stashing crude in Singapore’s underground caverns.

The world’s largest oil company plans to start using the storage space in the second half of 2027, locating supplies closer to some of its top customers as war disrupts its export routes, Bloomberg reports.

Saudi Aramco is seeking storage space abroad following disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, along with attacks on a major Saudi pipeline and other energy infrastructure.

Singapore’s Jurong Rock Caverns can hold about 9 million barrels of oil, though the amount of space Saudi Arabia would use has yet to be announced.

Singapore’s Energy Minister Tan See Leng said Aramco is due to sign a preliminary agreement with the country’s Energy Market Authority and JTC, the government agency that owns the caverns, with negotiations expected to wrap up within a few months.

Abu Dhabi’s Core42 is expanding its services to help governments and businesses use artificial intelligence while keeping confidential information within their own borders and under their control.

The G42 subsidiary is offering customers dedicated cloud environments reserved for their own use, Mohammed Retmi, Vice President of Core42’s Sovereign Cloud division, told The Circuit. The firm’s customers include government agencies, hospitals, banks and other businesses that must meet local requirements for protecting sensitive data.

Core42 launched a partner program this month to help software companies, startups and resellers build and sell cloud and AI services in the UAE. The program began with more than 50 partners, providing access to Microsoft Azure tools on a platform serving more than 47 Abu Dhabi government entities.

Previously, Core42 focused on services where customers shared computing resources, with safeguards to keep their information separate. The new options offer greater control over where data is stored and processed – part of what the industry calls “sovereign” cloud services.

“We differentiate ourselves by mastering sovereignty,” Retmi said, referring to customers’ ability to control their information and the systems that process it.

Core42 serves more than 500 government and corporate customers and employs some 1,100 AI and cloud specialists. The company was formed in 2023 through the merger of several businesses within G42, the Abu Dhabi technology group at the center of the UAE’s AI ambitions.

G42’s investors include the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Microsoft, the U.S. investment firm Silver Lake, and the Dalio Family Office.

Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Swiss technology company Ombori, said Core42 has proven valuable in ensuring governments can switch between technology providers without losing control over their systems.

“The test over time is who holds the keys, who operates the platform, and how easily a ministry or bank could move its workloads if it had to,” Hassellöf told The Circuit in an interview.

Core42’s latest expansion includes an October memorandum of understanding with Assolombarda to help manufacturers in Italy’s Lombardy region adopt AI and a UAE partner program launched with more than 50 software developers, startups and resellers.

In June, it announced it had more than tripled computing capacity at its Lake Mariner site in New York to 60 megawatts. That followed $550 million in HSBC financing announced in May to support expansion in the U.S. and Europe.

Core42’s domestic business has also grown. In February, the UAE Central Bank signed an agreement with the company to build a secure computing platform for the financial sector, designed to keep critical banking information under national control.

In March 2025, the Abu Dhabi government teamed up with Core42 and Microsoft to move its services onto a locally controlled cloud system. The project supports the emirate’s broader $3.5 billion digital strategy through 2027.

Those agreements followed partnerships in 2024 with First Abu Dhabi Bank to move its computing operations to Microsoft Azure and with Al Etihad Payments to develop the UAE’s Open Finance system, allowing customers to share banking and insurance information securely with approved providers.

Core42 is also widening customers’ choice of technology through its Compass platform, which offers access to more than 50 AI models. Its systems support suppliers including Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Cerebras, and Microsoft, giving customers alternatives to relying on a single company.

Retmi said that offering customers greater control comes with trade-offs. Dedicated systems can cost more to operate and offer fewer options than shared services from major global providers.

“A private cloud will give you less number of features … but it’s more sovereign,” Retmi said.

Retmi joined Core42 after more than two decades in technology and telecommunications, including senior roles at Orange Business Services and SITA. His career has taken him across France, Switzerland and the UAE.

He now leads Core42’s efforts to give customers greater control over their data and computing systems. But even systems operated entirely within a country’s borders need foreign-made chips and equipment, putting complete independence out of reach.

“There is still dependency, but it’s less dependent,” Retmi said.

Robinhood Markets will launch a new Middle East base in Dubai next year as the American fintech continues its rapid global expansion.

The California-based firm has been authorized by the Dubai Financial Services Authority to offer trading and custody services across 10 asset classes, including equities, cryptocurrency, exchange-traded funds and investment tokens, Bloomberg reports. It will set up an office in the Dubai International Financial Centre.

Robinhood, which is popular among young people for its zero-commission trades, mobile-first service and gamification of stock trading, launched full operations in the European Union last year and is also preparing to launch in Singapore.

The DIFC office, which will serve as the firm’s regional headquarters, “brings us closer to building a global platform that enables anyone, anywhere to own the highest quality financial assets,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said.

Saudi Aramco plans to store more of its oil abroad as Houthi attacks threaten supplies at home. The kingdom is negotiating access to foreign governments’ strategic oil storage, while Aramco aims to double its overseas storage capacity, CEO Amin Nasser told Al Arabiya.

“Commercial storage available through partners is limited. The larger capacity lies in what we call strategic storage owned by governments,” Nasser said in the interview on Thursday. “The Ministry of Energy is working with its counterparts in other countries to make strategic storage available for Aramco.”

Aramco already stores oil in South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands and Egypt and is looking to expand particularly in Asia, though Nasser gave no timetable or capacity figures.

Brent crude climbed above $112 a barrel today after attacks on Aramco’s Shaybah oil field, close to the UAE border, and Dammam airport each killed two people, following September drone strikes that shut down the kingdom’s main east-west pipeline for several days. Attacks this month on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport left 18 dead and prompted the postponement of Saudi Arabia’s flagship Future Investment Initiative conference and other events.

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department ordered some government employees and their families to leave Saudi Arabia amid the Houthi attacks, Reuters reports.

Mubadala Bio, the life sciences arm of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, signed a deal with Eli Lilly to localize packaging and logistics for the U.S. pharmaceutical company’s blockbuster GLP-1 obesity and diabetes treatments.

The agreement, announced at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit, will support packaging and warehousing facilities at Khalifa Economic Zones Abu Dhabi, a vast industrial zone situated along the main motorway between the UAE capital and Dubai.

The UAE, which faces high rates of obesity and diabetes, has been quick to embrace GLP-1 drugs and was an early launch market for Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro-branded treatment following U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. It was the second country in the world to approve Foundayo, the company’s newer pill-based treatment.

Meanwhile, California-based wearable tech company Oura announced a partnership with Abu Dhabi’s health department to study whether its smart rings can detect risk of premature births by combining continuous health measurements with clinical and genomic data.

Oura CEO Tom Hale, told the summit that the company decided to invest in the region because of the “spirit of innovation and discovery” that runs “from top to bottom.” Oura, which has had backing from Sanabil, the venture capital arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, postponed its planned $2.2 billion IPO last month citing uncertainty in the market.

Among the other deals signed at the summit, AstraZeneca has agreed to use Abu Dhabi as a priority location for global clinical trials, with the potential to deliver up to $50 million in investment in life sciences research in the emirate by 2030.

UAE startup CNTXT AI is training robots to fold T-shirts and pick up water bottles while developing Arabic voice tools that help companies serve customers in their own dialects.

The company is opening its first U.S. office in Silicon Valley, where most of its clients are based, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The robotics business records people performing everyday tasks in workplaces to give machines practical training beyond the lab, while its Arabic voice models cover more than 25 dialects.

CNTXT AI raised $60 million in June and says it has $300 million in committed revenue, mostly from U.S. cloud providers, AI developers and large businesses.

Abu Dhabi is positioning itself as a global hub for predictive healthcare, inviting international partners to collaborate on developing new technologies that detect early signs of disease and guide treatment.

“In Abu Dhabi, we are building a system that cares before it cures. A system that can act before symptoms appear, because every symptom was once a signal,” Mansoor Ibrahim Al Mansoori, Chairman of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, said on Tuesday at the Future Health Summit. “Bring your ideas. Bring your capital. Bring your talent. Together, let us build, let us test and let us scale globally.”

Sheikh Shakhboot bin Nahyan, UAE Minister of State, told the audience in a keynote speech that the country is seeking to share its experience in genomics, cancer and rare diseases with healthcare systems around the world. “Science has delivered remarkable progress, but its benefits have not yet reached everyone,” he said. 

The UAE’s Emirati Genome Program has collected nearly 1 million genetic samples while the country’s healthcare data infrastructure connects more than 2,000 facilities and contains over 3.5 billion clinical records, Sheikh Shakhboot said.

Will Ahmed, the CEO of wearable fitness-tracker maker WHOOP, told the conference that his company is opening an office in the UAE and establishing a partnership with Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health that will conduct “a ton of really powerful research” on how to extend human longevity.

Ahmed said his Boston-based firm, recently valued at $10.1 billion, is moving ahead with plans for an IPO. “We’re building the business to be a successful standalone business, which of course means that we could be a public company in the near future,” he said.

The inaugural Future Health Summit was expected to draw participants from 100 countries, with 130 speakers and more than 175 exhibitors, including AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot and Isomorphic Labs President Max Jaderberg.

Saudi Arabia postponed its Future Investment Initiative conference a week before the flagship financial event was scheduled to take place, as participants expressed reluctance to travel to Riyadh in the midst of deadly Houthi missile and drone attacks.

Organizers of the 10th annual FII summit, which was due to begin Oct. 26, sent messages today to the thousands registered for the event that it would be delayed until an as-yet-undetermined date in 2027.

“This decision comes from a deep commitment to our partners, members, speakers, and delegates,” the FII Institute said in an email received by The Circuit. “Because this is our landmark 10th edition, we want to ensure it delivers the full scale, extraordinary quality, and unforgettable impact that our community has come to expect and truly deserves.”

Houthi attacks on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport have killed at least 18 people over the past two weeks.

Bankers at JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup were already canceling meetings, while teams around CEOs Jamie Dimon and Jane Fraser weighed whether they should attend amid concerns that hotels and nearby landmarks could become targets, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today.

The postponement adds to disruptions affecting Riyadh Fashion Week, the Six Kings Slam tennis tournament and the PIF Saudi International golf tournament, hitting events central to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans to expand business and tourism.