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.

Video conferencing platform Zoom is building up its presence in Saudi Arabia.

The company announced today at the LEAP25 conference in Riyadh that it will invest $75 million in the kingdom on projects connected to artificial intelligence and AI data centers.

Mobily, the Saudi telecom, said it will invest more than $900 million to develop centers and lay down submarine cables to improve cross-border connectivity.

Mobily CEO Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Badran said the cables would link the Gulf with Africa under the Red Sea and strengthen digital infrastructure across the MENA region.

As Gulf states seek to reduce their dependence on oil sales, they’re finding new markets for copper, lithium and other metals needed for the energy transition.

Mining companies in Oman, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are planning to launch metal trading firms to tap the growing demand, the Financial Times reports.

Abu Dhabi-based International Resources Holding, a mining company that is part of a conglomerate chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, has hired a 60-person trading unit to handle energy and metals.

Minerals Development Oman, the state-owned mining company, is also in the process of hiring a top executive to lead a 25-person trading team, the FT says.

Saudi Arabia kicked off its LEAP25 conference with a flurry of billion-dollar deals and a campaign to rebrand the kingdom as a cauldron of tech innovation on par with Europe.

Opening the annual LEAP event in Riyadh on Sunday night, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Al-Swaha ticked off a series of investments worth $14.9 billion that were due to be signed this week.

Al-Swaha attributed the kingdom’s tech growth to the Vision 2030 roadmap introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 to diversify the economy and wean it off its longtime dependence on oil sales.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” Al-Swaha said. “As a tech force, as His Royal Highness said, this region is the new Europe.” Based on the number of startups gestating in the kingdom, he said, Saudi Arabia would be the fifth largest tech hub if it were located in the EU zone.

Touted as the biggest tech exhibition in the world, LEAP25 attracts many of the major biggest players, including Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, Cisco, SAP, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba and Huawei.

More than 1,800 international and local exhibitors, including 680 startups, are populating the exhibition floor at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center.

Among the deals announced at the event, Groq, a U.S.-based artificial intelligence firm, said it will invest $1.5 billion in a project developed with Saudi Aramco to launch the world’s largest AI inferencing data center in Saudi Arabia, Arab News reports.

U.S.-based Databricks pledged to invest $300 million over the next three years to upskill Saudi citizens, build the company’s business in the kingdom, and contribute to the local digital economy. SambaNova, another U.S. software firm, agreed to invest $140 million to build advanced AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.

Tara Brady, President of Google for Europe, the Middle East and Africa said the company will contribute $70 billion to the kingdom’s economy over the next 10 years.

Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Larry Ellison and Tony Blair will headline next week’s World Governments Summit in Dubai, one of the Middle East’s key annual gatherings for both politicos and investors.

Artificial intelligence, of course, is a major focus this year with Omar Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for AI, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications – and summit Vice Chairman, due for an onstage chat on Tuesday with Google CEO Pichai.

Musk, the world’s richest person, is expected to make an appearance in a session called “Boring Cities, AI and DOGE.” Blair, the world-trotting entrepreneur and former U.K. Prime Minister, and Oracle founder Ellison will interview each other in front of the 6,000 registered participants.

The political line-up over the three-day conference will feature the presidents of Indonesia, Poland, Sri Lanka, and Colombia, along with the prime ministers of Kuwait, Armenia, Pakistan, Kenya, Libya, Georgia, and Bangladesh.

In Miami, meanwhile, final preparations are underway for the Saudi Future Investment Initiative’s Priority Summit, a spinoff of the annual Davos-patterned event in Riyadh.

Among those participating in the Feb. 19-21 meeting will be Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Princess Reema bint Bandar, Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih, PIF Governor and FII Institute Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan, SoftBank Group Corp Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son and Serena Ventures Managing partner Serena Williams.

Also BlackRock Co-founder and President Robert S. Kapito, Oracle  Safra Catz, Neuberger Berman Chairman and CEO George Walker, Point72 CEO and New York Mets owner Steven Cohen, Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and Bridgewater Associates CEO Nir Bar Dea.

While Silicon Valley venture capitalists continue making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia in search of cash, the kingdom’s native startups are drawing more investment from other countries than its Gulf peers.

For the second consecutive year, Saudi Arabia was on the receiving end in 2024 of $750 million to lead the MENA region in collecting VC investments, according to a report by MAGNiTT. The UAE followed with $613 million.

On the providing end, government-owned Saudi Venture Capital Co. has committed $1 billion in investments since its inception in 2018, Arab News reports.

Adding contributions from partners raises the total to $4.8 billion over the six-year span, spread among VC, private equity, debt and private credit markets, according to SVC’s latest Impact Report.

“We are committed to further stimulating the private capital ecosystem in Saudi Arabia by launching required investment programs and developmental initiatives based on an analysis of the ecosystem’s needs,” SVC’s CEO Nabeel Koshak said in the report.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, meanwhile, is in talks for a $3.1 billion loan guarantee with Sace, the Italian insurer and export credit agency, Bloomberg reports. If negotiations reach an agreement, Sace will provide guarantees to a group of international banks for a range of Saudi projects.

The talks follow Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s trip to Saudi Arabia last month, where she met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the two countries agreed on deals worth $10 billion.

While hedge funds, law offices and wealth managers are pouring into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, other parts of the Gulf are also attracting interest from international businesses.

BlackRock, for one – the world’s largest asset manager, with holdings of about $11.5 trillion – is scouting office space in Kuwait City as it tries to deepen ties in the region, Bloomberg reports.

The New York-based firm is in discussions with Kuwaiti regulators and could make a final decision as soon as this month, according to the news outlet, which said BlackRock declined to comment.

Kuwait’s state-run KUNA news agency, meanwhile, reported that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink was in Kuwait on Monday and met with Emir Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah.

BlackRock has close links to Kuwait, whose sovereign wealth fund, the $1 trillion Kuwait Investment Authority, is one of its top shareholders.

Elsewhere in the Gulf, London-based private equity firm Permira plans to open an office in Dubai, issuing a statement on Mondeay that said it will seek fresh strategic partnerships with institutional and private wealth investors in the region.

Permira’s new representative office in Dubai’s financial center is still subject to regulatory approval. Among the major draws to the region are the Gulf’s sovereign wealth funds that control roughly $4 trillion in assets.

Private wealth is also an attraction. Dubai is now home to family offices that control more than $1 trillion in assets, according to Bloomberg.

Saudi Arabia has persuaded hundreds of companies to establish regional headquarters in the kingdom by making it a prerequisite for winning government contracts.

Speaking at the World Investment Conference in November, Saudi Investment Minister Khalid Al-Falih said more than 550 firms had complied with the regulation, pointing to announcements the previous week by Citibank and Morgan Stanley on their expanded Saudi offices.

Setting up headquarters in Saudi Arabia comes with perks, including a 30-year exemption from corporate income tax and access to discounts and support services.

The UAE is moving ahead with plans to transform a piece of Jordan’s Red Sea beachfront into a luxury resort.

MAG Group, a subsidiary of ADQ’s AD Ports Group that was appointed on Sunday as the project’s developer, said it will soon begin work on the Marsa Zayed property in the southern port city of Aqaba, which abuts the Saudi border.

In the first phase, MAG will begin construction on ​​what will be called the Zayed Riviera with four residential towers, a yacht club, and restoration of the Aqaba Minaret.

The Jordanian project could potentially link to similar planned resorts in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel that form a border-traversing horseshoe around the Red Sea.