<![CDATA[Middle East AI News]]>https://www.middleeastainews.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LEUS!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9947ccf9-8bd3-409d-a9be-e1b6ad1e4cf9_1280x1280.pngMiddle East AI Newshttps://www.middleeastainews.comSubstackTue, 15 Sep 2026 18:39:36 GMT<![CDATA[M42 to adopt Oracle data platform for AI healthcare]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/m42-to-adopt-oracle-data-platformhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/m42-to-adopt-oracle-data-platformTue, 15 Sep 2026 08:40:14 GMT
Illustration (Image credit: MEAN via Gemini)

#UAE #Healthcare - Abu Dhabi’s global health company M42 is adopting Oracle Health Data Intelligence to unify clinical, genomic and real-world patient data across its network. The tool will integrate with Oracle Health Foundation EHR to support chronic disease management, population health programmes and precision care. M42 will roll the platform out first within its diabetes programmes, aiming to enable earlier detection of health trends and more personalised treatment. The move builds on a longitudinal patient record initiative the two companies launched last year, which folded Emirati Genome Programme data into electronic health records.

SO WHAT? - Healthcare AI lives or dies on data quality, but most hospital networks still keep clinical, genomic and real-world data in separate systems that don’t talk to each other. M42 is trying to close that gap by pulling everything into one platform. Unifying the data could enable AI models to both spot disease patterns across a population, and to support more personalised, data-driven treatment pathways. The two companies have agreed to begin with diabetes, a chronic condition that benefits heavily from continuous monitoring and early intervention.

KEY POINTS:

  • M42 is to adopt Oracle Health Data Intelligence to unify clinical, genomic and real-world data across its healthcare network. The platform will be integrated with Oracle Health Foundation EHR.

  • The Oracle platform is designed to support chronic disease management, population health programmes and precision care delivery via AI-driven insights.

  • To begin with, M42 plans to deploy the platform first within its diabetes programme. The move will enable proactive patient engagement and better long-term outcomes for chronic disease patients.

  • The collaboration builds on a strategic partnership launched last year between M42 and Oracle that created unified longitudinal patient records across the UAE healthcare ecosystem.

  • That earlier data transformation initiative integrated data from the Emirati Genome Programme into electronic health records. This made pharmacogenomic information available to clinicians for the first time, allowing them to create personalised treatment pathways.

  • The platform is intended to give researchers advanced analytics and AI-driven exploration across large datasets. The new tools will help clinicians identify disease patterns, correlations and risk factors more efficiently.

  • The initiative is underpinned by data, digital and AI governance principles to ensure data is managed securely and in line with regulatory compliance.

  • M42, established in 2023 from the merger of G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health, operates more than 480 facilities in 26 countries with over 20,000 employees.

ZOOM OUT - M42 emerged in April 2023, after Abu Dhabi AI group G42 and sovereign investor Mubadala Investment Company completed the merger of their healthcare arms, G42 Healthcare and Mubadala Health. The combined entity paired G42's data and AI technology with Mubadala Health's hospital network and patient services. M42 launched with assets including HealthPoint Hospital, Moorfields Eye Hospital Abu Dhabi, Imperial College London Diabetes Centre and the National Reference Laboratory. The healthcare group icontinues to expand internationally and partner with global pharmaceutical and healthtech companies.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Oracle, M42

Read more about M42:

]]><![CDATA[UAE Factory Forward to accelerate manufacturing transformation]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-factory-forward-to-acceleratehttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-factory-forward-to-accelerateTue, 15 Sep 2026 05:48:10 GMT

#UAE #industry4.0 - The UAE Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology (MoIAT) has launched Factory Forward, a national platform bringing the country’s industrial technology transformation programmes under one roof. The initiative aims to speed up adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution tools across UAE factories. It builds on programmes that have already reached more than 700 factories, including over 620 assessed through the Industrial Technology Transformation Index. Factory Forward connects manufacturers with technical experts, technology providers, financing and support programmes. It supports the National Strategy for Industry and Advanced Technology and the Make it in the Emirates programme.

SO WHAT? - The UAE has run several industrial technology programmes including the Industrial Technology Transformation Index (ITTI) to assess factory readiness for digital transformation, and an Advanced Technology Financing programme backed by Emirates Development Bank (ADB). The launch of Factory Forward aims to makes it easier for manufacturers, especially smaller ones, to access MoIAT Indusry 4.0 programmes, resources and partners.

KEY POINTS:

  • The Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology (MoIAT) has launched Factory Forward UAE, a national initiative unifying the country’s industrial technology transformation programmes under a single platform.

  • The initiative supports the National Strategy for Industry and Advanced Technology and aims to accelerate adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) tools, including AI, across UAE factories.

  • It builds on programmes that have already helped more than 700 factories, including over 620 assessed through the UAE’s Industrial Technology Transformation Index (ITTI).

  • Factory Forward UAE guides manufacturers through their technology transformation, helping them identify what technology they need and connecting them with technical experts, providers, support programmes and financing.

  • The platform will share case studies of successful factory transformations and real-world technology use, helping manufacturers learn from others before choosing their own solutions.

  • The initiative is backed by a mix of public and private sector partners split into three roles: technology partners assess operations and readiness, enablement partners provide training and advice, and financing partners help fund transformation projects.

  • The launch aligns with the UAE’s Make it in the Emirates programme, which aims to grow high-value domestic industry and strengthen the country’s position as a global hub for advanced manufacturing investment.

ZOOM OUT - Rockwell Automation's 11th annual State of Smart Manufacturing Report, found that 98 percent of Middle East manufacturers see digital transformation as essential, well ahead of Europe, the US and the global average. Regional manufacturers back that up with close to 30 percent of operating budgets going to industrial technology, and AI adoption has moved past pilots into core operations covering quality control, cybersecurity and process optimisation. The report flags workforce skills, not technology or budget, as the main constraint on further progress.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Emirates News Agency, media, Rockwell Automation

Read more about Industry 4.0:

]]><![CDATA[HUMAIN, KAUST explore Shaheen cloud access]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/humain-kaust-explore-shaheen-cloudhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/humain-kaust-explore-shaheen-cloudTue, 15 Sep 2026 02:00:44 GMT15-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

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Note: this is an experimental podcast using a clone of my voice created by AI. Unfortunately, the voice clone is prone to some errors, including mispronunciations of some Arabic words and place names. However, I’m always working to improve this.

]]><![CDATA[Oman’s O-Green targets 200MW of AI data centres]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/omans-o-green-targets-200mw-of-aihttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/omans-o-green-targets-200mw-of-aiMon, 14 Sep 2026 15:39:51 GMT
O-Green solar farm (Image credit: O-Green)

#Oman #datacentres - Oman’s state-backed clean energy platform O-Green is plans to build more than 200 megawatts of AI-ready data centre capacity across the Sultanate, Spain and other markets by 2028. The push builds on a renewable energy development portfolio exceeding 11 GW across 12 countries. O-Green’s developments include a 2.7 GW Continuous Renewable Energy project spanning Duqm and Mahout that combines solar, wind and battery storage to deliver around 770 MW of power. The company’s new strategy positions data centres as a downstream extension of O-Green’s existing solar, wind and battery storage business, aiming to provide reliable, low-carbon electricity at scale. The announcement was made as Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology held the inaugural founding meeting of the Green Artificial Intelligence Alliance.

SO WHAT? - AI data centre build-outs across the Gulf rely on gas or grid capacity. O-Green is trying a different route, first building the renewable generation and storage, then selling compute as an extension of that. This could allow Oman to position itself as a low-carbon alternative to power-constrained AI hubs elsewhere in the region, at a moment when data centre operators globally are struggling to secure enough clean electricity to meet their own sustainability commitments.

KEY POINTS:

  • O-Green plans to build more than 200 MW of AI-ready data centre capacity across Oman, Spain and other international markets by 2028, according to a company press release. The announcement was made as the inaugural founding meeting of the Green Artificial Intelligence Alliance was held in Muscat, hosted by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology.

  • The strategy rests on O-Green’s renewable energy development portfolio, which exceeds 11 GW across 12 countries, spanning solar photovoltaic, wind generation and battery energy storage systems (BESS).

  • The flagship Omani project is a 2.7 GW Continuous Renewable Energy development spanning Duqm and Mahout, combining solar, wind and storage to deliver around 770 MW of firm renewable power.

  • Data centres and advanced computing are named among the energy-intensive industries expected to benefit from the Duqm-Mahout project’s firm power supply.

  • O-Green’s wider Omani portfolio includes solar capacity at Suhar Industrial City and wind development at Duqm, alongside plans to build renewable-energy technology manufacturing capacity.

  • The company is pursuing a vertically integrated model, aiming to combine renewable generation, storage, land and infrastructure into a single clean-power and compute offering.

  • The move coincides with the launch of Oman’s Green Artificial Intelligence Alliance, formed by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology alongside the Ministry of Energy and Minerals and the Authority for Public Services Regulation.

  • The Alliance is tasked with promoting renewable-powered AI and HPC deployment, supporting research into net-zero computing, and building national capacity in sustainable AI, in line with Oman Vision 2040.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: O-Green, Oman media

]]><![CDATA[HUMAIN to share KAUST’s Shaheen III supercomputer]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/humain-to-share-kausts-shaheen-iiihttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/humain-to-share-kausts-shaheen-iiiMon, 14 Sep 2026 12:31:31 GMT
Shaheen III at KAUST (Image credit: KAUST)

#SaudiArabia #HPC - Saudi Arabia’s national AI company HUMAIN and Saudi Arabia research university KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) are exploring a collaboration to make KAUST’s Shaheen III supercomputer available through HUMAIN Cloud. Shaheen III, one of the world’s most powerful computers, would provide large-scale compute capacity for selected enterprises and researchers. The two organisations plan to target biotechnology, materials science, oil and gas, and manufacturing, though no definitive commercial agreement has yet been signed.

SO WHAT? - HUMAIN and KAUST aim to plug one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful research supercomputers into a commercial AI cloud platform. The deal could give local enterprises access to compute normally reserved for scientific institutions. For HUMAIN, still building out its sovereign cloud ambitions, it’s a shortcut to serious HPC capacity without having to build it from scratch. For KAUST, it’s both a way to utilise more of Shaheen III’s CPU compute capacity and potentially a route to commercial relevance for infrastructure. Nothing is signed yet, but the intent could lead to a new kind of commercial-academic collaboration in the Kingdom.

KEY POINTS:

  • HUMAIN and KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) are exploring a collaboration to make KAUST’s Shaheen III CPU-based supercomputer partition available as a compute resource within HUMAIN Cloud, HUMAIN’s planned AI cloud offering.

  • Shaheen III is an HPE Cray EX supercomputer consisting of two partitions: a CPU partition and a GPU-accelerated partition. The Shaheen III GPU partition is ranked 22nd globally in the Top500 list June 2026, while the Shaheen III CPU partition is ranked 64th in the Top500 list June 2026.

  • The collaboration would target compute-intensive domains including biotechnology, materials science, oil and gas, and manufacturing. There are also plans for industry blueprints and reference architectures on HUMAIN’s HPC-as-a-Service platform.

  • Access is intended for selected eligible enterprises and researchers, supporting data processing and analytics, scientific discovery, engineering simulation, and digital twins.

  • KAUST retains sole ownership and operational control of Shaheen III, and existing compute allocations for its own researchers remain unchanged.

  • KAUST has confirmed Shaheen III operates in compliance with applicable export control regulations and licence conditions.

  • As of the announcement, HUMAIN and KAUST have not entered into any agreement for the commercial supply of Shaheen III capacity. Any expanded access will depend on definitive agreements and regulatory approval.

  • HUMAIN is building full-stack AI capabilities spanning data centres, cloud infrastructure, AI models including Arabic large language models, and sector-specific AI solutions.

  • KAUST has been ranked the top university in the Arab world for three consecutive years by Times Higher Education.

ZOOM IN - Built by HPE on a direct liquid-cooled Cray EX architecture, Shaheen III runs as two systems in one. The supercomputer’s CPU partition holds 4,608 AMD Genoa (EPYC 9004 series) nodes, each with 192 cores and 384 GB of memory, delivering 35.6 PetaFlop/s of sustained performance. The system is ranked 64th in the June 2026 TOP500 global supercomputer list. Meanwhile, sitting alongside it is a GPU partition of 2,800 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, which hit 122.8 PetaFlop/s and is ranked 22nd in the June 2026 TOP500 (the fastest machine in the Middle East at the time of its installation). Together, the two partitions give KAUST both the CPU throughput for data-heavy workloads and the GPU power for large-scale AI training. Projects earmarked or the machine included Arabic language models, a digital twin of the Arabian Peninsula, materials discovery, and rare-disease diagnostics research.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: HUMAIN, KAUST

Read more about the Gulf’s supercomputers:

]]><![CDATA[Gulf AI adoption races ahead of skills]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/gulf-ai-adoption-races-ahead-of-skillshttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/gulf-ai-adoption-races-ahead-of-skillsMon, 14 Sep 2026 02:00:51 GMT14-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

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Note: this is an experimental podcast using a clone of my voice created by AI. Unfortunately, the voice clone is prone to some errors, including mispronunciations of some Arabic words and place names. However, I’m always working to improve this.

]]><![CDATA[Gulf firms race ahead on AI, as skills fall behind]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/gulf-firms-race-ahead-on-ai-as-skillshttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/gulf-firms-race-ahead-on-ai-as-skillsSun, 13 Sep 2026 15:25:56 GMT

#GCC #adoption - Nine in ten organisations across the Gulf have started adopting or scaling artificial intelligence, according to research from recruitment firm Cooper Fitch. The research finds that multinational companies are scaling AI enterprise-wide at six times the rate of local Gulf businesses (42 percent versus 7 percent). Rather than cutting jobs, 55 percent of organisations are merging roles and restructuring teams. Corporate investment in training hasn’t kept pace with AI adoption, though, with only 29 percent of firms have formal upskilling programmes in place.

SO WHAT? - The survey findings somewhat undercut the narrative that AI is wiping out jobs. Research shows is a widening gap between what AI can do and what staff are equipped to do with it. Three-quarters of firms report productivity gains, but fewer than a third have trained people to sustain them. The gap, more than the technology itself, may decide which organisations actually benefit and which end up with expensive tools nobody knows how to use properly.

KEY POINTS:

  • 90% of GCC organisations surveyed have begun adopting or scaling AI, with multinational companies scaling enterprise-wide at six times the rate of local Gulf-owned businesses (42% versus 7%). This, according to Cooper Fitch’s “Redefining Work: AI & the Future of Talent” report, which surveyed executives representing more than 200,000 employees across the GCC.

  • Government and semi-government entities were found to have varying levels of Ai adoption. 21% have scaled AI across functions, 42% remain in pilot or exploratory stages, and 16% report no adoption yet.

  • Just 8% of organisations invest more than $5 million annually in AI, and around a third of those spend upwards of $25 million, pointing to enterprise-level commitment among a small group of high spenders.

  • About 30% of organisations have no defined AI owner. The exception is financial services, where 73% place responsibility with the C-suite (53%) or IT leadership (20%).

  • Speed-to-execution has overtaken cost-cutting as the top driver for AI investment, cited by roughly a third of respondents. Many organisations are now shifting focus from automating single tasks to redesigning entire workflows.

  • 55% of organisations are merging responsibilities and restructuring teams rather than cutting jobs outright, with AI removing specific tasks rather than eliminating whole roles.

  • 76% of organisations report productivity gains from AI, including moderate gains of 10-30% for most and gains above 30% for a smaller group. Only 29% have formal training programmes to match.

  • Employee sentiment appears to falls sharply with seniority. Senior executives remain the most optimistic about AI outcomes, but that positive sentiment drops 33 percentage points between C-level executives and individual contributors, the steepest decline of any seniority band.

  • UAE organisations lean on internal training programmes to build AI awareness, while Saudi companies favour partnerships and external hiring to close capability gaps.

  • Sector priorities vary widely: finance and banking (46%) focus on compliance and risk modelling, technology (42%) on innovation and customer experience, and consulting (30%) on speeding up research and proposal work.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Cooper Fitch

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Read more about the Gulf’s AI adoption:

]]><![CDATA[Omani AI startups almost double in one year]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/omani-ai-startups-almost-double-inhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/omani-ai-startups-almost-double-inSun, 13 Sep 2026 05:45:56 GMT
Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT)

#Oman #startups - The number of Omani companies operating in artificial intelligence reached 42 by the end of August 2026, up from 22 a year earlier, a 91% increase, according to Tawah bint Abdullah Al Dawood, Head of the Development and Studies Section at Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT). Quoted by Oman News Agency, Al Dawood said Omani AI startups are increasingly moving beyond prototypes into commercially viable solutions deployed across government and private-sector applications.

SO WHAT? - Despite the small numbers, the increase in Omani AI startups provides an early sign that the government’s AI strategy is having an impact. MTCIT overhauled its national AI strategy in 2024, with greater focus on both encouraging local entrepreneurs and attracting global startups. Importantly, the government seems to be tracking the technological and commercial progress of new AI companies, rather simply counting the registrations. In a market the size of Oman encouraging AI startups that have real business viability is more critical than the overall numbers.

KEY POINTS:

  • The number of Omani AI companies reached 42 by the end of August 2026, up from 22 the previous year, representing 91% growth, according to Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology.

  • Quoted by ONA, the Ministry’s Head of the Development and Studies Section Tawah bint Abdullah Al Dawood said Omani AI startups are developing technological solutions that improve business efficiency, enhance services, automate processes and enable better data-driven decision-making.

  • She said the growth reflects the rapid development of Oman’s specialised technology ecosystem and companies’ growing ability to move from prototypes to commercially viable products for government and private-sector use.

  • The expansion supports Oman’s ambition to build an innovation- and knowledge-based digital economy in line with the objectives of Oman Vision 2040.

  • Omani AI companies are contributing to the localisation of technical knowledge and expertise, building national capabilities in AI, data and software development, and creating advanced technical career opportunities.

  • The government hopes that the growing success of these companies will help strengthen private-sector confidence in AI’s economic opportunities, encouraging further adoption and investment.

  • Omani AI startups have growing opportunities to expand into regional and international markets, given that AI-based digital solutions can scale beyond domestic borders.

  • MTCIT is working to strengthen data and indicators for the AI sector to enable more comprehensive and accurate measurement of investment and growth going forward.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Oman News Agency (ONA)

Read more about the AI in Oman:

]]><![CDATA[UAE pledges 40 billion Euros for Germany]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-pledges-40-billion-euros-forhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-pledges-40-billion-euros-forSat, 12 Sep 2026 02:00:39 GMT12-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

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Note: this is an experimental podcast using a clone of my voice created by AI. Unfortunately, the voice clone is prone to some errors, including mispronunciations of some Arabic words and place names. However, I’m always working to improve this.

]]><![CDATA[UAE to Invest €40B in Germany with a focus on AI, energy & industry]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-to-invest-40b-in-germany-withhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-to-invest-40b-in-germany-withFri, 11 Sep 2026 03:38:39 GMT
(Image credit: WAM)

#UAE #Germany #bilaterals - The UAE has announced plans to invest 40 billion euros in Germany across industry, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and energy, timed to coincide with the state visit of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Berlin. Of the total, 10 billion euros will go specifically to the German state of Bavaria, a leading European technology and innovation hub,. The announcement builds on growing momentum in UAE-Germany relations and follows similar scale investment agreements struck with France and Italy last year.

SO WHAT? - The Germany pledge follows a pattern the UAE has now repeated across three major European economies in the space of 18 months. It committed $40 billion to Italy and up to €50 billion to France, both deals built around AI, advanced technology and infrastructure rather than traditional sectors like real estate or hospitality. In France, that translated into a 1.4 gigawatt Paris AI campus backed by Abu Dhabi’s tech investment fund MGX, Bpifrance, Mistral AI and Nvidia. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi's G42 backed large-scale AI compute clusters in Grenoble and Italy. The Germany deal extends the same playbook to Europe's largest economy, and suggests more announcements on specific investments are still to come.

KEY POINTS:

  • The United Arab Emirates plans to invest 40 billion euros in Germany, spanning industry, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and energy. The announcement was made during the state visit of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Berlin.

  • The UAE President was accompanied by several ministers and senior UAE officials including His Excellency Faisal Al Bannai, Advisor to the UAE President for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs. Al Bannai is also Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC)l, Chairman of Abu Dhabi's advanced defence technology group EDGE and Chairman of the ATRC’s AI company AI71.

  • Of the total investment, 10 billion euros will be allocated to the German state of Bavaria, a hub for Germany’s automotive, engineering and technology industries.

  • The announcement builds on growing momentum in UAE-Germany relations, reflecting the UAE’s stated confidence in Germany’s industrial, technological and innovation capabilities.

  • The investment combines Germany’s advanced industrial, technological and research capabilities with the UAE’s investment expertise and capacity to support and scale major projects.

  • Officials said the bilateral agreement creates new opportunities for companies and institutions in both countries to establish long-term partnerships. The deal also stands to deepen cooperation in sectors expected to drive growth and competitiveness over coming decades.

  • The partnership is also expected to become a platform for exchanging knowledge, skills and experience between the two countries, supporting the UAE’s ambitions to build a knowledge and innovation-driven economy.

  • Beyond its financial scale, the investment is positioned as the foundation for a long-term strategic partnership between Germany and the UAE.

ZOOM OUT - The Germany deal is consistent with UAE policy since 2023, when it began treating digital infrastructure investment as a standard component of bilateral agreements. By May 2024, Invest UAE had signed ten digital infrastructure memorandums, with partners including Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Greece and Uzbekistan, targeting a combined 7 to 8 gigawatts of data centre capacity worth an estimated $60 billion or more. Subsequent bilateral agreements with France, Italy and the USA in 2025 were all heavily focused on AI, technology exchange and AI infrastructure build-outs. In parallel, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds have been targeting large-scale AI infrastructure investments globally. The combination of bilateral agreements and commercial deals via funds are thought to equate to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of AI infrastructure investments.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Emirates News Agency, MEAIN

Read more about the UAE’s bilateral digital investment deals:

]]><![CDATA[Positron raises $875M in Series C, as QIA returns]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/positron-raises-875m-in-series-chttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/positron-raises-875m-in-series-cFri, 11 Sep 2026 02:00:47 GMT11-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

Stories that you may have missed…

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Note: this is an experimental podcast using a clone of my voice created by AI. Unfortunately, the voice clone is prone to some errors, including mispronunciations of some Arabic words and place names. However, I’m always working to improve this.

]]><![CDATA[Positron AI raises $875 million at $5 billion valuation]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/positron-ai-raises-875-million-athttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/positron-ai-raises-875-million-atThu, 10 Sep 2026 13:40:30 GMT
Mitesh Agrawal, CEO, Positron at Web Summit Qatar (Credit: Husni Khuffash)

#UnitedStates #funding - Positron AI has raised $875 million in a Series C financing round, which valued the Reno-headquartered AI inference hardware company at $5 billion valuation, The raise fun the final milestone of its next-generation Asimov chip production and Titan system production ramp. The round was co-led by venture firms NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) returning as an investor. The financing follows Positron’s deployment of more than 50 racks of its Atlas inference system at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

SO WHAT? - This funding round lands on top of momentum Positron has built over the past 8 months in the Middle East: it’s first global expansion market. In December the company hired a managing director for the Middle East and North Africa; in February QIA backed the company’s $230 million Series B; and by June it had opened its first office outside the US at Dubai International Financial Centre, with further regional offices planned. Positron has expanded quickly into the region to take advantage of its early deployment market, one where sovereign AI ambitions and enterprise inference demand are both scaling fast. Fresh funding gives Positron the balance sheet to back up that regional momentum.

KEY POINTS:

  • Positron AI has raised $875 million in Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation, split into a $375 million Series C tranche and a Series C-1 tranche of up to $500 million.

  • The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel’s SemiAnalysis Capital and Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, with four of these investors joining Positron’s board.

  • Additional investors include Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), DFJ Growth, Cisco Investments, Hudson River Trading and Naver Ventures, alongside earlier backers Arena Private Wealth, Helena and Unless.

  • The funding will finance the tapeout of Asimov, Positron’s next-generation silicon, which moves to TSMC’s N3P process at the end of 2026 with production beginning in the second half of 2027.

  • Asimov pairs Positron’s compute architecture with between 288 gigabytes and 2,304 gigabytes of memory per chip, while Titan combines four to eight Asimov chips into systems designed to serve models beyond 16 trillion parameters with context windows exceeding 10 million tokens.

  • The capital also funds a 2 megawatt-plus engineering data centre and emulation platform, plus supply commitments for LPDDR5X memory, a commodity alternative to the constrained HBM and CoWoS packaging supply chains most AI chipmakers depend on.

  • Positron is already deploying more than 50 racks of its first-generation Atlas system at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with additional production customers including Jump Trading and i3d.net.

  • CEO Mitesh Agrawal said deploying Atlas at scale taught the company what inference customers actually need, lessons it has carried directly into designing Asimov and Titan.

ZOOM OUT - Positron's pitch rests on a simple bet: memory, not raw compute, is what's holding AI inference back. Most AI accelerators are built around theoretical FLOPs with memory bolted on as an afterthought, achieving under 30 percent of their realised memory bandwidth on real workloads. Positron inverts that with its Asimov architecture, using commodity LPDDR memory rather than expensive High Bandwidth Memory to hit over 90 percent realised bandwidth utilisation at a fraction of the cost and power. The company argues training and inference need fundamentally different silicon, and that no single chip architecture will dominate inference going forward, positioning its hardware to work alongside GPUs rather than replace them. Tech firms are buying into Positron’s vision with more than 50 racks of its first-generation inference system Atlas currently being deployed as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Positron AI, MEAIN

Read more about Positron AI

]]><![CDATA[K2 models fully-open sourced; HUMAIN seeks $2.5B data centre financing]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/k2-models-fully-open-sourced-humainhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/k2-models-fully-open-sourced-humainThu, 10 Sep 2026 04:05:24 GMTGood morning!

Welcome to this week’s Middle East AI News email digest!

Another busy week as we begin to enter the Middle East’s cooler season. In today’s edition, MBZUAI launches what it says is the world’s largest fully open AI model fleet; HUMAIN unveils a 428-billion-parameter Arabic frontier model while preparing for a possible IPO and seeking $2.5 billion for data centre expansion; Egypt moves ahead with a NVIDIA-powered AI data centre; the UAE prepares to launch FedAI for agentic government services; and Algeria crates government committees to implement its national AI strategy.

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And don’t forget Ai Everything Abu Dhabi is taking place in a little over three weeks! So, if you haven’t yet registered for the event, here’s the link!

Thanks for reading!

/Carrington

AI Models

IFM releases largest fully-open model fleet

Illustration of K2 summit (Image credit: MEAN via Gemini)

#UAE #AImodels - The Institute of Foundation Models formed by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has released K2 Horizon, a six-model open fleet ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. The suite publishes weights, code, training data and methods under Apache 2.0, while targeting devices from smartwatches to enterprise servers. (Middle East AI News)

HUMAIN unveils 428bn-parameter arabic model

#Saudi #LEAP5 - Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN last week unveiled humain-m3, a 428-billion-parameter Arabic frontier model developed with China’s MiniMax. Pre-trained on more than one trillion native-Arabic tokens, the mixture-of-experts system topped the average score across seven public Arabic benchmarks and is available in research preview on HUMAIN Node. (Middle East AI News)

TokenAI launches 16bn-parameter cyber model

#Egypt #cybersecurity - Alexandria-based TokenAI has released Horus Cyber Nano 1.0, a 16-billion-parameter multimodal model for cybersecurity and secure coding, with open weights for local deployment. TokenAI says it beats GPT-4o on some vision and reasoning benchmarks, while its larger Horus Cyber model remains paused pending additional safety requirements in Egypt. (Middle East AI News)

R&D

TII wins Qualcomm grant for edge aviation AI

#UAE #aviation - Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has become the first Middle East organisation to receive Qualcomm’s Tech for Good Grant. TII will adapt its SADEED predictive-maintenance platform for Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ9 edge processor, enabling cargo drones and future eVTOL aircraft to detect component degradation. (Middle East AI News)

Investment

HUMAIN seeks $2.5 billion for data centre expansion

#Saudi #datacentres - Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN is seeking $2.5 billion to finance its data centre expansion through a dedicated fund managed by BSF Capital. The vehicle would back an initial 250 megawatts, potentially mixing debt and equity, as HUMAIN targets one gigawatt of data centre capacity by 2027. (Middle East AI News)

HUMAIN starts preparations for possible IPO

#Saudi #IPO - HUMAIN has begun building an IPO preparation team, signalling groundwork for a possible stock-market listing. The company is recruiting for investor strategy and pitch preparation roles as it expands Saudi ambitions in AI infrastructure, data centres and large-scale computing. (Bloomberg)

Agentic AI

UAE readies FedAI for agentic government systems

#UAE #government - The UAE is preparing to launch FedAI, a federal technical ecosystem for building and operating agentic AI across government. The Council for Artificial Intelligence and Development has also approved the implementation phase of the wider Agentic AI for UAE Government Project, (Middle East AI News)

EMB Global named OpenAI select partner

#UAE #partnerships - Abu Dhabi-based EMB Global has been named an OpenAI Select Partner, joining the first firms appointed under OpenAI’s new Partner Network. EMB will combine GPT-5.6 models with its enterprise platforms for secure agentic AI deployments. (Middle East AI News)

Infrastructure

OmniOps and HPE plan sovereign Saudi systems

#Saudi #infrastructure - Saudi AI infrastructure company OmniOps has signed an agreement with HPE to build sovereign AI systems for government and regulated enterprises. The project will combine locally manufactured hardware with Saudi-developed software, aiming to keep deployments and sensitive workloads entirely within the Kingdom’s domestic infrastructure. (Middle East AI News)

Vodafone Egypt builds national AI factory

#Egypt #datacentres - Vodafone Egypt and Cassava Technologies have launched Egypt’s first national AI factory using NVIDIA GPUs and sovereign infrastructure. The platform will provide GPU-as-a-Service to government and businesses while keeping data inside Egypt for compliance and cybersecurity. (Africa AI News)

Education

Jordan gets $3.5m grant for school digital plan

#Jordan #schools - Jordan will use a $3.5 million World Bank grant to prepare a digital transformation plan for about 3,500 public schools. The work will assess connectivity, devices and infrastructure and also plan an EdTech and Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre. (Middle East AI News)

Google revives free Gemini offer for Arab students

#MENA #GenAI - Google has relaunched its year-long free Gemini student offer across Arab markets, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan. Eligible university students aged 18 and over can access Gemini 3.1 Pro, research and study tools, image and video generation, with 400 gigabytes of storage. (Google)

Kurdistan launches first AI Olympiad with $30,000

#Iraq #innovation - Iraq’s Kurdistan Region has launched its first AI Olympiad in Erbil, offering $30,000 in prizes. Participants will spend six weeks developing practical AI solutions, with winners also receiving opportunities in South Korea, as regional authorities seek to build local technology skills and applied innovation capacity. (Kurdistan24)

Banking

AI-native Mal opens waitlist after $230M seed funding

#UAE #AInative - Abu Dhabi fintech Mal has opened a global waitlist for an AI-native Islamic finance platform, backed by $230 million in seed funding. The company plans multi-market launches spanning payments, financing, investment and business services, positioning the UAE-based venture to target digital Islamic financial services internationally. (Zawya)

AI Policy

Egypt and OECD develop five-year AI strategy

#Egypt #AIstrategy - Egypt is working with the OECD on a five-year AI strategy focused on responsible adoption, workforce skills, government standards and secure data exchange, Planning and Economic Development Minister Ahmed Rostom said whilst speaking at AIM Congress in Dubai. (Middle East AI News)

Algeria advances national artificial intelligence strategy

#Algeria #AIstrategy - Algeria has created five committees covering infrastructure, financing, language models and training to implement its national artificial intelligence strategy, creating. The government also plans a national AI and data research centre, aims to train 50,000 specialists by 2030, and will develop AI-based public-sector technology systems. (Dzair Tube)

Morocco union seeks AI job protections

#Morocco #jobs - Morocco’s National Federation of Call Centers and Offshoring Professions is urging government action as AI reshapes outsourcing. It wants national retraining, recognised digital certifications and public support tied to job protection, amid estimates that up to 4.6 million Moroccan jobs could be affected by AI by 2030. (Middle East AI News)

Oman to add standards for AI and EVs

#Oman #standards - Oman is expanding technical standards work into artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and renewable energy. Authorities in Muscat are proposing GCC standards covering AI environmental sustainability and data quality for machine learning, broadening the Sultanate’s standards agenda as emerging technologies become more central to regional industry and regulation. (Oman Observer)

Sentiment

Egypt AI awareness triples to 65% since 2023

#Egypt #Research - AI awareness in Egypt has risen from 22% in 2023 to 65% in 2026, according to a Cabinet IDSC (Information and Decision Support Center) survey. Among users, 93.9% rated AI outputs positively, although concerns around privacy and potential job losses remain widespread as adoption expands. (Middle East AI News)

[ This newsletter was both AI edited & human edited ]

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]]><![CDATA[UAE readies FedAI for government agents]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-readies-fedai-for-governmenthttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-readies-fedai-for-governmentThu, 10 Sep 2026 02:01:05 GMT10-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

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]]><![CDATA[UAE creates federal government AI ecosystem]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-creates-federal-government-aihttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/uae-creates-federal-government-aiWed, 09 Sep 2026 09:21:10 GMT
(Image credit: WAM)

#UAE #government - The UAE’s Ministerial Council for Artificial Intelligence and Development, chaired by His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court, has reviewed plans to launch FedAI, a federal technical AI ecosystem empowering federal government entities build, adopt and operate Agentic AI solutions. The meeting at Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi also cleared the Agentic AI for UAE Government Project to move into its implementation phase, following a first phase that assessed government services and set priorities across ministries and federal entities.

SO WHAT? - Naming and structuring FedAI as a dedicated technical ecosystem gives UAE government stakeholders a single framework to standardise how federal entities build and secure AI agents. This should allow the government to better mitigate governance risks from the implementation of autonomous AI agents, as the federal government moves to the next phase of the Agentic AI for UAE Government Project.

KEY POINTS:

  • The UAE’s Ministerial Council for Artificial Intelligence and Development, chaired by H.H. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, met at Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi to review the Agentic AI for UAE Government Project’s strategy and updates.

  • The Council reviewed plans to establish FedAI, a national technical ecosystem enabling federal government entities to develop, adopt and operate Agentic AI solutions within a secure, flexible system.

  • Other initiatives reviewed include the establishment of a customer experience lab to apply Agentic AI across government services, and internal government competitions designed to engage employees in developing AI solutions.

  • Sheikh Mansour said Agentic AI represents a new phase in developing the Government of the Future, aiming to translate its capabilities into tangible improvements in government efficiency, service quality and speed of execution.

  • He said the UAE is building a government system that is smarter, more flexible and more proactive, using Agentic AI to shape services, operations, policies and decisions within secure digital infrastructure.

  • The Council discussed results from the Agentic AI Project’s first implementation phase, which focused on building government capabilities and surveying and assessing government services, operations and tasks to set priorities.

  • Projects, services and operations submitted by ministries and federal entities during the first phase will now move into the coming phase, where they will be launched using Agentic AI.

  • The same meeting also reviewed government decisions across multiple sectors, including healthcare and genomics regulation, commercial companies, food safety and tax system efficiency, alongside updates on environmental sustainability and investment policy.

ZOOM OUT - This week's Council for AI meeting follows a workshop held in Dubai last month, where more than 100 federal officials launched the strategic track of the Agentic AI for UAE Government Project. Unlike earlier phases focused on transactional services such as tax auditing and procurement, this track embeds AI into policy formulation and strategic foresight across seven pillars, from government performance to global competitiveness, operating under the principle "human leads, AI enables." It follows a rapid sequence of 2026 milestones: an April framework announcement by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the first cohort of four operational AI agents unveiled in May, and 90-day sprints launched in June for 50 federal entities to build their own agents. The UAE's target of converting 50% of federal government operations to agentic AI within two years makes FedAI's national ecosystem the technical backbone this expanding rollout will need.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: UAE Government

Read more about the government Agentic AI project:

]]><![CDATA[Egypt developing AI strategy in cooperation with OECD]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/egypt-developing-ai-strategy-in-cooperationhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/egypt-developing-ai-strategy-in-cooperationWed, 09 Sep 2026 06:18:41 GMT
H..E. Ahmed Rostom, Egypt’s minister of economic development speaking at AIM 2026 in Dubai (Image credit: AIM 2026)

#Egypt #AIstrategy- Egypt has begun working with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to develop a national artificial intelligence strategy, Minister of Planning and Economic Development H.E. Ahmed Rostom said at the 15th AIM Congress in Dubai. The five-year plan will focus on responsible AI adoption, public awareness, standardised government systems and secure data exchange. Egypt launched its 2025-2030 National AI Strategy last year and its currently unclear whether the work with the OECD is on enhancing the existing plan, replacing the existing strategy or planning for 2030-2035.

SO WHAT? - Rostom framed AI adoption explicitly around workforce protection rather than replacement, in recognition of growing public awareness about the technoogy’s potential impact on jobs. A July poll by the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) found that 56 percent of Egyptians believe wider AI adoption will eliminate jobs (a figure barely changed since 2023). The minister said that the goal of the AI strategy is to empower people to supervise and control machines, not substitute for them. His comment suggests that Egypt is trying to increase the focus on workforce readiness.

KEY POINTS:

  • Egypt has begun intensive cooperation with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to formulate a national AI strategy, Minister of Planning and Economic Development Ahmed Rostom announced at the 15th AIM Congress in Dubai. Egypt is a Non-Member Partner of the OECD.

  • The strategy will establish a five-year vision for expanding responsible use of AI and emerging technologies, raising public awareness, and standardising government systems and regulations for secure data exchange. It is not clear whether this work aims to enhance or replace Egypt’s existing National AI Strategy 2025-2030.

  • Speaking in a congress session on ‘Quiet Reinvention of Global Manufacturing and the Art of Production at Scale', Rostom commented on the Egyptian economy and its manufacturing sector before talking about AI strategy. He called for effective regulatory frameworks to ensure transparency and accountability, and stronger cybersecurity standards to address risks from increasingly autonomous interactions between algorithms.

  • He stressed that AI integration in production must go hand in hand with workforce reskilling, saying the objective is to empower people to supervise and control AI systems rather than replace them.

  • Rostom called for greater investment in science and technology programmes at universities to widen access to AI knowledge, particularly among disadvantaged groups.

  • He warned that failing to develop workforce capabilities alongside technological progress could turn the digital divide into a structural challenge for future employment.

ZOOM OUT - Egypt's current National AI Strategy 2025-2030 was launched by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi in January 2025 with a plan to lift the ICT sector's GDP contribution to 7.7 percent by 2030, create over 250 AI startups and produce 30,000 AI professionals. The strategy rests on six pillars, governance, infrastructure, technology, data, ecosystem and talent, and includes ambitions for a national Arabic-language foundation model (now called Karnak). Egypt has been building AI policy since 2017, establishing its National Council for Artificial Intelligence in 2019 and its first national strategy in 2021, work that helped it climb 49 places on Oxford Insights' Government AI Readiness Index between 2019 and 2023. It remains unclear how the OECD partnership adds to the existing strategy.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Egypt SIS

Read more about Egypt’s national AI strategy:

]]><![CDATA[Egypt’s TokenAI launches Horus Cyber Nano]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/egypts-tokenai-launches-horus-cyberhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/egypts-tokenai-launches-horus-cyberWed, 09 Sep 2026 02:00:46 GMT09-Sep-26 - Welcome to the Middle East AI News Minute, brought to you by Carrington Malin - Marketing for an AI First world. In this podcast:

Stories that you may have missed…

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Note: this is an experimental podcast using a clone of my voice created by AI. Unfortunately, the voice clone is prone to some errors, including mispronunciations of some Arabic words and place names. However, I’m always working to improve this.

]]><![CDATA[Abu Dhabi’s TII wins first regional Qualcomm research grant]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/abu-dhabis-tii-wins-first-regionalhttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/abu-dhabis-tii-wins-first-regionalTue, 08 Sep 2026 07:48:46 GMT
(Image supplied)

#UAE #R&D - Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has become the first organisation in the Middle East to win Qualcomm’s Tech for Good Grant. The grant funds a collaboration to adapt TII’s SADEED predictive maintenance platform for Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ9 edge AI processor, letting cargo drones and future electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft monitor the health of safety-critical systems onboard, without relying on constant cloud connectivity.

SO WHAT? - Predictive maintenance running onboard rather than through the cloud solves a real barrier to commercial drone and eVTOL deployment. Remote aircraft can’t always guarantee a stable connection, yet still need to catch component failures before they happen. TII’s SADEED platform moving from research to real-world deployment also strengthens Abu Dhabi’s bid to become a testbed for Advanced Air Mobility. This could also provide an example of how Qualcomm’s Dragonwing processors can catalyse maintenance process in industry still largely governed by scheduled inspections.

KEY POINTS:

  • Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the research arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), has become the first Middle East institution to receive Qualcomm’s Tech for Good Grant, supporting the co-development of onboard edge AI predictive maintenance technology for Advanced Air Mobility.

  • The collaboration adapts TII’s proprietary SADEED Prognostics and Health Management platform to run on Qualcomm’s Dragonwing IQ9 edge AI processor, enabling onboard analysis without continuous cloud connectivity. The collaboration could give operators real-time, sovereign control over safety-critical health data processed onboard rather than sent elsewhere.

  • SADEED is designed to help cargo drones and future eVTOL aircraft identify early signs of component degradation before they develop into operational failures, supporting a shift toward condition-based maintenance.

  • The platform builds on more than two years of research by TII’s AI Diagnostics and Prognostics team within its Propulsion and Space Research Center, and is now moving toward real-world onboard deployment.

  • The project adds to TII’s broader work on Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Air Mobility ecosystem, having already helped establish the technical foundations for the UAE’s planned future air corridors.

  • TII operates nine dedicated research centres spanning advanced materials, autonomous robotics, cryptography, AI and digital science, quantum computing, secure systems, and renewable energy.

  • TII and Qualcomm announced a strategic collaboration win January 2026 to advance edge-AI and autonomous solutions across real-world environments.

ZOOM OUT - The TII grant is part of a wider Qualcomm investment across the Gulf, as the forty-year-old chipmaker repositions itself from a mobile chip supplier into a full-stack AI platform provider. Qualcomm opened a Global Engineering Center in partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office last year. It has also formed strategic partnerships with UAE technology companies Core42 and e&. In Saudi Arabia, it has opened a new Riyadh office and a Riyadh AI Engineering Centre (in collaboration with Saudi AI company HUMAIN). Qualcomm's regional AI go-to-market strategy encompasses its Dragonwing platform for edge and industrial IoT, plus its newer Dragonfly portfolio and C1000 CPU pushing into the accelerating data centre inference. With live deployments already running across all three layers, edge, industrial IoT and data centre inference, in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the region has become Qualcomm's proving ground for its AI compute strategy.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Qualcomm, TII

Read more about Qualcomm in the Middle East

]]><![CDATA[TokenAI releases Horus Cyber Nano 1.0]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/tokenai-releases-horus-cyber-nanohttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/tokenai-releases-horus-cyber-nanoTue, 08 Sep 2026 06:22:49 GMT
Illustrative image of a robotic Horus (Image credit; MEAIN via Google Gemini)

#Egypt #cybersecurity - Alexandria-based TokenAI has released Horus Cyber Nano 1.0, a compact 16-billion parameter multimodal model built for cybersecurity, secure coding and defensive technical work. The release followed confirmation that the release of the full-size mixture of experts model was paused in order to meet further open weight safety requirements. According to the developer, the smaller model outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o on some vision and reasoning tests and approaches the performance of Qwen2.5-VL-72B, a model several times its size.

SO WHAT? - TokenAI pausing its own release over a safety violation, then publishing a compact version with added safeguards, provides useful evidence of the company’s commitment to responsible AI. The future version of the full Horus Cyber model is also expected to be released with the blessing of Egypt’s National AI Council. For the region’s wider AI ecosystem, Horus Cyber Nano also matters because it’s a specialised open-source model built for a specialised commercial use case, cybersecurity and secure coding. This comes at a stage when most of the region’s open-source model releases are more general in nature.

KEY POINTS:

  • TokenAI has released the official compact weights for Horus Cyber Nano 1.0 on 8 September 2026 via Hugging Face. This comes shortly after the initial release was paused in order to comply with the open-source community’s safety policy.

  • The compact version is built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture and is available through the Horus Cyber Nano 1.0 collection on Hugging Face, alongside GGUF variants for local deployment.

  • Horus Cyber Nano 1.0 is a 16-billion parameter multimodal reasoning model that processes text, images and video, targeting secure code review, visual inspection, video understanding and defensive technical workflows.

  • The model uses 64 routed experts and 2 shared experts with 6 active per token, a 131,072-token maximum context length, and can process images up to 3.2 million pixels.

  • TokenAI’s internal and published evaluations show the model outperforming GPT-4o on some vision and reasoning benchmarks, while approaching the performance of Qwen2.5-VL-72B, a model roughly 100 times larger, on several multimodal tasks.

  • Published benchmark scores include 84.4 on MMBench-EN-v1.1, 91.8 on MATH, 82.0 on MMLU and 91.4 on ScreenSpot-V2, though TokenAI cautions that testing conditions vary across model comparisons.

  • TokenAI is already working on a further Horus Cyber Nano release aimed at stronger capabilities, higher performance and lower computational cost.

  • The company’s Horus Cyber Pro models remain closed source, with TokenAI planning to release open weights in the coming months pending approval from Egypt’s National AI Council.

ZOOM OUT - Horus Cyber Nano 1.0 is TokenAI's significant open weight release after Horus 1.0-4B, a 4 billion parameter open-source model the Alexandria-based startup released in April 2026. Horus 1.0-4B scored 88% on the MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) benchmark, beating Qwen 3.5-4B, Llama 3.1-8B and Gemma-2-9B, all larger models. Egypt graduates around 60,000 technology students a year and employs half a million people in ICT, yet homegrown AI models built from scratch remain rare, making founder TokenAI’s Horus family something of an outlier.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: Token AI

LINKS

Read more about the Horus family of models:

]]><![CDATA[IDSC poll: 94% of Egyptian AI users trust its answers]]>https://www.middleeastainews.com/p/idsc-poll-94-of-egyptian-ai-usershttps://www.middleeastainews.com/p/idsc-poll-94-of-egyptian-ai-usersTue, 08 Sep 2026 04:26:16 GMT

Egypt #GenAI - Public awareness of AI applications in Egypt has nearly tripled, according to a new survey by the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC). Among Egyptians who had heard of AI tools, the poll found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most widely used platform (26.3%), with Google Gemini coming in second (10.9%). Meanwhile, 93.9 percent of users rated AI outputs positively, 55 percent remain concerned about sharing personal data, and 56 percent still believe wider AI adoption will eliminate jobs (a figure barely changed since 2023).

SO WHAT? - The new IDSC poll finds that awareness of AI in Egypt has surged, but attitudes toward its risks have barely moved in three years. Based on the data, public familiarity with AI tools hasn’t translated into greater public confidence. This is highly relevant to the National AI Strategy 2025-2030, which prioritises public awareness and data governance. Persistent job-loss fears remain, especially in clerical, administrative and manual roles, suggesting the government’s programmes to increase AI awareness and technical education, also need to address public trust.

KEY POINTS:

  • Egyptian public awareness of AI applications rose to 65% in 2026 from 22% in 2023, according to a new Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC). The survey was conducted between 15 and 28 July, 2026.

  • ChatGPT was the most used AI platform among those aware of AI tools, cited by 26.3% of respondents, followed by Gemini at 10.9%, Meta applications at 2.9%, and other tools at 2.2%.

  • Work was the leading reason for using AI, cited by 51.7% of Egyptian users, ahead of personal matters at 38.3% and study at 32.3%. Respondents were able to select multiple answers.

  • Satisfaction with AI outputs was high, with 93.9% of users rating results as acceptable or excellent, while only 3.7% described them as poor.

  • Despite the positive experiences with AI identified by the survey, 55% of AI users said they worried about sharing personal data with these platforms.

  • Concerns about job losses from AI remained largely unchanged from three years ago, with 56% of respondents believing greater AI reliance would eliminate many jobs, against 57% in 2023.

  • Clerical and administrative roles topped the list of jobs respondents expected AI to affect, at 6.2%, followed by factory and manual work at 5.3% and teaching at 5%.

  • Nearly half of respondents, 48.8%, said AI could pose a future danger, with 46.1% of those rating the risk between eight and ten on a ten-point scale; reduced independent thinking was the most cited concern at 17.8%.

  • The government plans to introduce programming and AI courses in technical schools from the 2026/27 academic year as part of efforts to prepare young people for a changing labour market.

ZOOM OUT - Egypt’s National AI Strategy 2025-2030 targets lifting the ICT sector’s GDP contribution to 7.7 percent by 2030 and building 250 AI companies employing 30,000 professionals. The government has already rolled out a public Arabic-language BelMasry platform and piloted its own large language model, Karnak, alongside free Gemini access for university students. Egypt’s ICT sector record 24.3 percent growth in the last fiscal quarter, according to new Minister of Communications and Information Technology data, with outsourcing exports reaching $5.1 billion. The persistence of public concern over jobs and privacy, even as AI adoption and acceptance climbs, appears to show that public trust lags, even as national technology programmes make real progress.

[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]

Source: IDSC, MCIT, MEAIN

Read more news from Egypt:

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