GCC AI News — 25 Oct 2026

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence's Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) and Abu Dhabi's Inception42 launched Jais 3, an Arabic-native AI family, with The National reporting the unveiling on 24 October. It pairs six open language models, from a 900-million-parameter version small enough to run on a phone up to a 375-billion-parameter flagship, with Jais Speech, a speech-recognition model covering Modern Standard Arabic and dialects spoken across 19 Arab countries. It handles code-switching between Arabic, English and French, identifies the dialect spoken, and can add Arabic vowel marks. Built on IFM's open-source K2 Horizon, the models are available on Hugging Face, with the 7B and 32B versions earning the highest average Arabic scores among open models of comparable size.

Most leading AI models treat Arabic as an afterthought, flattening its many dialects. A sovereign, open model fleet that understands everyday Gulf and North African speech, and runs on local hardware, lets Arabic-speaking governments, businesses and citizens use AI in their own language and keep control of their data.

A UAE government call centre or clinic could deploy Jais Speech to transcribe Arabic conversations across dialects in real time, and use the smaller Jais 3 models on local devices to draft documents or answer resident queries in natural Arabic without sending data abroad.

At Nvidia's GTC conference in Berlin on 22 October, Saudi AI company HUMAIN announced an expanded partnership with Nvidia to develop up to 84 megawatts of AI computing capacity, roughly 27,000 next-generation GPUs, in two phases through 2027. The first phase deploys 14MW of Nvidia Blackwell Ultra HGX B300 systems, about 6,000 GPUs linked by Quantum-X800 networking, starting in the fourth quarter of 2026 to serve Humain Cloud customers including AI companies, enterprises and government entities. A second 70MW phase of next-generation Vera Rubin infrastructure, about 21,000 GPUs, is planned from mid-2027. HUMAIN, chaired by the Crown Prince and owned by the Public Investment Fund, targets about 3GW of data-centre capacity by 2030.

Access to large-scale, modern AI compute is the foundation of every national AI ambition. HUMAIN rapidly expanding its Nvidia footprint turns Saudi Arabia's energy and capital into globally competitive cloud capacity, giving local developers, enterprises and public bodies the infrastructure to build and run advanced AI at home.

A Saudi enterprise or government body could run demanding AI workloads on Humain Cloud's new Blackwell capacity from late 2026, training or serving models on sovereign infrastructure inside the Kingdom instead of relying solely on overseas clouds.

Emirates NBD and OpenAI announced an enterprise collaboration making the Dubai-based group the first bank in the MENA region to deploy OpenAI's GPT models using in-country inference infrastructure in the UAE, the bank said on 19 October. Running the models on UAE-based infrastructure lets the bank adopt frontier AI at enterprise scale while meeting local expectations on data residency, privacy and operational resilience. Emirates NBD plans to apply the models across four areas: customer engagement on digital channels, risk and compliance analytics, automation of knowledge-intensive workflows, and employee productivity, connecting OpenAI's models to its internal systems and enterprise data. The bank reports that 97% of its transactions and requests already happen outside branches.

Banks operate under strict data and compliance rules that often slow AI adoption. Running frontier models inside the country, under local data-residency rules, shows how Gulf institutions can embrace advanced AI responsibly, and it validates the UAE's investment in sovereign AI infrastructure as a genuine enabler for regulated industries.

An Emirates NBD customer could get faster, AI-assisted answers and digital services, while the bank's risk teams use the same in-country models to strengthen fraud and financial-crime controls, all without customer data leaving the UAE.

Qatar's Amir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, ratified Cabinet Decision No. 34 of 2026 establishing a National Center for AI within the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, published in the Official Gazette and reported by The Peninsula on 20 October. The centre, which reports directly to the Minister, comprises three departments and will play a pivotal role in leading and coordinating AI efforts across the state: preparing and implementing Qatar's national AI strategy, developing policies and regulatory frameworks for safe and responsible AI use, and supporting government entities through strategic partnerships. A separate Digital Capability Development and Training Department was created alongside it to build national skills.

Coordinated national leadership turns scattered AI pilots into a coherent strategy. By pairing a central AI body with a dedicated training department, Qatar is building both the governance and the human capability to adopt AI responsibly, a practical step toward the technology and skills goals of Qatar National Vision 2030.

A Qatari government entity planning an AI project could turn to the National Center for AI for strategy, policy guidance and partnership support, ensuring its deployment aligns with national standards for safe and responsible use rather than reinventing the rules each time.

Researchers at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi won first prize at the Robotic Urology Breakthrough Innovation Challenge at ERUS26, described as Europe's largest robotic urology meeting, for an AI system called Janus AI, The National reported on 23 October. Janus AI is a video-to-video retrieval system: it analyses footage captured live during robotic surgery and matches it against a library of 30-second clips from similar past procedures, surfacing up to three relevant examples at the same stage of the operation. Because features from every library clip are precomputed, only the live footage is processed in real time, so the similarity search runs in milliseconds. Surgeons can watch full reference videos to see how comparable procedures unfolded.

Surgical experience has traditionally been locked inside individual operating rooms and senior surgeons' memories. A tool that instantly surfaces how others handled the same moment turns past procedures into real-time guidance, helping trainees and surgeons make better decisions, and it is a home-built Emirati system winning on the global stage.

A surgeon or resident performing a robotic kidney operation could click a button mid-procedure and instantly see three clips of how experienced surgeons handled that exact step successfully, using proven approaches as a guide before taking the next action.

On 21-22 October, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced a preliminary framework with Netherlands-based AI cloud company Nebius, making it the anchor customer for a planned AI giga campus at Oxagon, NEOM's industrial city on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast. Nebius would take up to 50 megawatts, half of the initial 100MW now under construction as part of a planned 360MW first phase, with capacity coming online in stages from the fourth quarter of 2027. The agreement, reached just six weeks after construction began, is HUMAIN's first commercial milestone for the campus and signals international demand for Saudi-hosted compute. Nebius is expected to deploy Nvidia-powered infrastructure to serve its global customers. HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund company, is central to the Kingdom's Vision 2030 Year of AI.

Building data centres is one thing; filling them with paying global customers is the real test. Landing an international anchor tenant weeks into construction shows Saudi-hosted AI compute is becoming a genuine export business, turning the Kingdom's energy and infrastructure into globally relevant cloud capacity.

A global AI company needing large-scale compute could rent capacity at the NEOM campus through providers like Nebius, tapping sovereign Saudi infrastructure and abundant energy instead of waiting in long GPU queues in more saturated markets.

G42 signed memoranda of understanding in Athens on 22 October covering AI infrastructure, government services, life sciences and smart cities in Greece. Among them, G42 and its unit Core42 will explore developing an AI factory with Greek infrastructure and energy company Copelouzos Group, combining advanced data-centre infrastructure, cloud and compute. Other agreements cover applying AI to public services, life-sciences research and smarter, more connected cities. G42 framed the deals as the next chapter of international AI cooperation, extending the UAE's AI ecosystem into Europe through partnerships rather than outright ownership.

Exporting AI infrastructure and know-how marks a shift from the UAE building capability at home to shaping AI development abroad. International partnerships like this deepen the Gulf's role as a global AI player and open two-way flows of technology, talent and investment between the region and Europe.

A Greek municipality or healthcare provider could eventually tap G42's proposed AI factory and smart-city tools to run local public services or life-sciences research on shared infrastructure, benefiting from Gulf-backed compute and expertise delivered through local partnerships.

A study found that 82% of surveyed professionals across the GCC's consumer economy use AI daily or weekly, with findings presented at the 'Unlocking AI for the GCC Workforce' event in Dubai on 23 October, Khaleej Times reported. The survey covered 1,143 professionals across the six GCC countries in sectors including retail, automotive, hospitality and technology. Among regular AI users, 73% said the technology had improved their productivity and 35% reported saving at least four hours a week. The report noted that while 53% of organisations actively encourage AI use, only 20% provide extensive training, and just 39% of workers feel very or extremely confident using AI, pointing to training as the main opportunity.

High everyday adoption shows Gulf workforces have moved past curiosity into daily use, a strong base for the region's AI ambitions. The honest gap between usage and confidence also points to a clear, solvable next step: investing in training so people can use AI well, not just often.

A GCC employer could use these findings to prioritise structured AI training for staff, closing the confidence gap, since the data shows workers with both clear guidance and skills support are far more likely to use AI productively and reclaim hours each week.

On 22 October, Oman and the United Kingdom signed agreements including a memorandum of understanding between Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT) and investment firm Yamna for strategic cooperation on an AI data-centre project, with a first phase expected to exceed £1 billion, according to Oman News Agency. The project is expected to generate returns for UK-backed investors and create more than 100 highly skilled jobs in Britain through the export of British expertise, while building advanced AI compute capacity in Oman. The data-centre agreement sat within a broader package of cooperation covering investment, export financing, space and education, building on the existing UK-Oman sovereign investment partnership.

Reliable local AI compute is the foundation every digital-economy ambition rests on. A billion-pound international investment in Omani data-centre capacity accelerates the Sultanate's Vision 2040 digital goals and shows global investors backing the Gulf as a place to build, not just buy, AI infrastructure.

An Omani business or public body could eventually run AI workloads on new in-country data-centre capacity, keeping data and processing local while supporting the skilled technology jobs the investment is designed to create on both sides.

On 20 October at Fintech Forward 2026 in Manama, Bahrain FinTech Bay, the Kingdom's leading fintech hub, signed a partnership with Dyna.Ai, a Singapore-headquartered AI-as-a-service provider, to deliver practical AI solutions across Bahrain and the wider GCC. The agreement supports Bahrain FinTech Bay's expanded strategy, announced days earlier at the same forum, to design and deliver AI products for banks and financial institutions in partnership with technology providers, and to offer AI training for senior leaders and operational teams. The two-day forum, themed 'Finance in the Age of Intelligent Infrastructure', was supported by the Central Bank of Bahrain, Tamkeen and the Bahrain Economic Development Board.

Many financial institutions know they need AI but lack both the tools and the trained people to deploy it safely. A hub-led model that builds products and upskills staff at once tackles both gaps together, helping Bahrain's banks adopt AI responsibly and reinforcing the Kingdom's position as a regional fintech centre.

A Bahraini bank could work through the fintech hub to deploy a ready-made AI tool for customer service or fraud detection, while sending its managers and operations teams through AI training so they can run the systems confidently rather than depending entirely on outside vendors.