Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion NEOM mega-project is getting off the ground.

Speaking at the Public Investment Fund’s Private Sector Forum in Riyadh, NEOM Chief Development Officer Denis Hickey said on Friday that the first phase of its 170 kilometer-long city, The Line, will be built at the Hidden Marina site on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast.

The first segment of the project will stretch 2.5 kilometers in length and rise 500 meters high.

It is expected to accommodate over 200,000 residents in 80,000 residential units, with 9,000 hotel rooms, as well as commercial and retail spaces, fire stations, schools, police and security services.

Saudi Arabia’s Northern Borders region is emerging as a key driver of economic growth and investment with its $1.2 trillion in mineral resources.

Its phosphate, coal, dolomite, limestone and silica sand deposits have made Saudi Arabia a leading mineral exporter.

The kingdom boasts five phosphate ore sites and has granted 29 active mining licenses, according to government statistics.

Mining and mineral exports have become a central part of Saudi Arabia’s shift from dependence on oil, which aligns with the government’s goal of diversifying the economy and deriving revenue from non-petroleum sources.

As this week’s World Governments Summit was wrapping up in Dubai, Khalfan Belhoul’s head was buzzing with all things AI.

Having hosted TIME Magazine’s TIME100 AI Impact Awards Gala at the Museum of the Future on Monday night, Belhoul, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, followed it up on Tuesday by signing a partnership pact with IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna to bolster the use of artificial intelligence tools in the wealthy Gulf financial center.

IBM will also co-publish so-called white papers with the Dubai Future Foundation in April to coincide with the inaugural Dubai AI Week. Belhoul promised more “very interesting announcements” in the coming days that will be “an example for the world.”

As head of a foundation that runs a $300 million venture capital fund and built the city’s iconic Museum of the Future – a massive seven-story elliptical loop with a silvery translucent skin covered in Arabic calligraphy – Belhoul has a challenging mission.

Appointed eight years ago by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, the Ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE, Belhoul was tasked to “imagine, inspire and design Dubai’s future.” To that end, the Boston University graduate with a master’s degree in e-commerce, assembled a team of scientists, researchers and startup investors to plot Dubai’s long-term roadmap.

“If we think that we will get it right every single time, then we will still not be a leading city of the future,” Belhoul told The Circuit. “Our platform has been built for us to pivot and to make mistakes.”

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Why does Dubai need a special foundation to chart its future?

When the Dubai Future Foundation was set up – I’ll be very frank with you – we had no clue how to set it up. The idea was that we needed to institutionalize future foresight. Fast forward now, around eight to nine years since the formation, we have a foresight team, we have a think tank, and we have an execution team. I think this shows you the balance between staying up to speed when it comes to what’s happening in the future and of course, you know most of the trends – and the hope and the fear at the same time. Whether it’s climate, AI, mobility, you name it. But then, how can you take all that and create a platform that is for the betterment of humanity? This is what we do.

Critics say you’re a dreamer and that many of the DFF’s ideas are unlikely to ever be put into practice. Are they right?

if you look at our projects, you would see that many of them have seen light and become an example for the world. And what I would really say to those people is that if we think this way, we will never be a leading city of the future. If we think that we will get it right every single time, then we will still not be a leading city of the future. Our platform has been built for us to pivot and to make mistakes.

If you look at investors in venture capital and their portfolio of investments in technology, 80 percent of their portfolio goes bust. But it’s that one story that creates history for them that recovers the whole portfolio. So you can see us working in the same way, where we create a safe environment to test and fail – as long as no one gets hurt or injured or nothing serious happens. Then, we double down on the winning bets and set an example for the world.

Look ahead. How will the DFF look 20 years from now?

Very futuristic. Constantly evolving. Our entity should grow in importance – not because I’m part of it, but because having an entity that becomes a think tank for Dubai and for the UAE to share a view on where the future is evolving is always a need because the future will continue to evolve.

And the interesting – I wouldn’t say scary – part is that this evolution is happening at a much faster pace. If you look at the industrial revolutions and the change from one to the other, you realize that the gap between one revolution to the next is shrinking. You see that our phones are advancing dramatically year after year. Let alone the evolution of AI, quantum computing, and robotics. So you can only imagine where we’re heading.

Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and other parts of the region are both friendly neighbors and well-financed rivals. How do you address the competition?

One word: Synergy. Second word: Complementing each other. I think Dubai and the UAE – our population is not big enough for a company to scale. Neither is any other Arab country in the world. It’s the whole region that should benefit from this growth. Nowadays, when you set up a business on your phone, with one click of a button, the world becomes your market. So, how do you really connect that world together? Connect the Arab world to ensure that those businesses can scale in a seamless way. And that’s the vision – collaboration, inclusivity, unity – working with one another and creating a bigger impact.

Offering the UAE an earth-boring contract potentially costing billions and a peek into his budget-slashing activities at the White House, Elon Musk headlined today’s final sessions at the World Governments Summit in Dubai.

Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, appeared on giant screens before the conference’s 6,000 participants, looking like Big Brother with the words, “Tech Support” emblazoned on his black T-shirt.

The 54-year-old chief of X, Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company earlier signed a draft agreement with the UAE government to dig the foundations for the “Dubai Loop.” He said the new public transportation system would speed residents and visitors underground across the Gulf financial center that is home to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.

“You just wormhole from one part of the city – Boom! – you’re out in another part of the city,” Musk said, answering questions from Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, as well as Vice Chair of the conference.

Describing his work as head of U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, Musk said dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development reflects a new approach: Washington is  “less interested in interfering with the affairs of other countries,” he said.

“Basically, America should mind its own business rather than push for regime change all over the place,” Musk told the crowd, which included at least 30 presidents and prime ministers from across the globe.

Musk was the last in a series of tech leaders from some of the world’s biggest companies who spoke at the government summit. On Wednesday, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair teamed up to examine the promise and threats of artificial intelligence.

Ellison, also speaking virtually with Blair onstage in Dubai, said AI will be transformative for governments and a broad range of industries including medicine, agriculture and robotics.

“Countries need to unify their data so it can be consumed and used by the AI model,” Ellison said, warning about the dangers of lax information security. “The digital tools we have right now are so primitive,” he said. “We can easily be locked out of all our data; passwords and data are so easily stolen and ransomed. We need to modernize our systems.”

On the first day of the conference, 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.

Saudi Arabia has lined up U.S. President Donald Trump to headline its annual FII Priority Summit in Miami, Fla., next week.

The kingdom’s Future Investment Initiative Institute announced on Wednesday that Trump will speak at the conference’s opening session Feb. 19 at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach. 

Among those also scheduled to participate in the three-day event are SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, BlackRock’s Robert S. Kapito, Oracle’s Safra Catz, Point72’s Steven Cohen and Bridgewater’s Nir Bar Dea. Saudi Public Investment Fund Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan is the conference’s host.

The Miami conference will take place in the wake of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pledge last month to invest at least $600 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. Trump responded with thanks while suggesting that the kingdom raise its investment to $1 trillion.

Florida is a center of Trump family activities, with the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach serving as the President’s home between terms in the White House. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner lives with his wife Ivanka Trump and three children on Miami’s exclusive Indian Creek Island. Kushner’s $4.6 billion private equity fund Affinity Partners, which is backed by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, is based in Miami.

Trump’s appearance at the conference also comes amid tension between the two countries after the President proposed that the U.S. take possession of the Gaza Strip. The plan would move some 1.8 million Palestinian residents out of the war-ravaged territory while building resort hotels that would turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and other Arab countries have condemned the Trump plan, saying any Gaza reconstruction effort must not force residents to leave.

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.

Six Flags, the biggest amusement park operator in the U.S., plans to build the world’s tallest, longest and fastest roller coaster in the Saudi capital.

The North Carolina-based company signed an agreement on Monday to manage both a Six Flags amusement resort and the Aquarabia Water Theme Park in Riyadh’s Qiddya district, which is being developed with billions of dollars of investment as the kingdom’s entertainment mecca.

Aquarabia will include the world’s tallest water coaster, the tallest double-loop water slide and Surftopia, Saudi Arabia’s first surfing pool.

The Falcon’s Flight roller coaster will dominate Six Flags Qiddiya City, alongside 27 other rides and attractions.

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.