This week's top stories —18-24 May
MGX backs Paris AI Campus, G42 & Mistral AI partnership, Falcon Arabic LLM...
This week has been nothing short of extraordinary for artificial intelligence news from the United Arab Emirates, with Abu Dhabi’s AI ecosystem dominating global technology news headlines. However, major announcements have not been confined to the Middle East, with Abu Dhabi tech fund MGX, holding group G42 and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) all unveiling global partnerships, investments and initiatives. Of these, the most anticipated was probably Thursday’s announcement of Stargate UAE, a 1 Gigawatt AI hub being built by a partnership between G42 and five global technology giants.
Here are this weeks biggest AI news stories!
Sunday, May 18th
◼ ADIA-LIST alliance tackles multi-agent AI risks
Research institutes create pioneering sandbox to test emergent AI behaviors
Monday, May 19th
🔊 Listen to Monday’s Daily News Minute
🔥 MGX & Bpifrance back 1.4GW Paris AI Campus project
Europe's biggest AI campus announced at Choose France Summit 2025
🔥 UAE unveils first homegrown AI satellite constellation
Sovereign satellite manufacturing programme launched in Abu Dhabi
🔥 WeRide launches first fully driverless taxis in Middle East
Abu Dhabi pioneers first fully driverless robotaxi service
◼ Bold Tech to develop AI cognitive city platform: Aion Sentia
Bold Technologies and My Aion Inc. to create cognitive city platform by 2027
◼ New AI Accelerator to boost EDGE Group AI development
New centre of excellence to enhance AI and AI talent development
◼ 70% of UAE consumers have used AI assistants to shop
Privacy concerns abound regarding retailers use of AI
Tuesday, May 20th
🔊 Listen to Tuesday’s Daily News Minute
🔥 G42 & Mistral AI announce strategic partnership
UAE-French partnership spans full AI value chain
◼ New partnership strengthens MBZUAI French research ties
MBZUAI and École Polytechnique forge elite AI alliance
◼ UAE embraces GenAI media content, West remains wary
Trust in AI gap widens between Gulf and Western markets
◼ UAE to develop AI to transform national media strategy
National Media Office awards contract to Presight to develop new platform
Wednesday, May 21st
🔊 Listen to Wednesday’s Daily News Minute
🔥 Falcon 3 LLM series gets first Arabic model
TII releases first Arabic Falcon AI model and new hybrid architecture model
🔥 G42 & WWT launch AI accelerator for industry solutions
Forge42 to fast-track industrial AI innovation Made in the UAE
🔥 Tarjama& secures $15m to scale Arabic.AI across industries
New funding to allow Arabic.AI to scale faster to fill the Arabic language gap
◼ IHC to launch Emirati AI marketplace agent ‘SAIF’
Smart Artificial Intelligence Facilitator (SAIF) to provide access to GPUs, LLMs.
◼ TII's Falcon AI models to join Amazon Bedrock Marketplace
New AWS collaboration brings scalable access to TII and AI71 AI products
◼ Presight to develop smart platform for UAE Media Council
Presight wins UAE Media Council contract for media content oversight platform
Thursday, May 22nd
🔊 Listen to Thursday’s Daily News Minute
🔥 Tech leaders unite to build Stargate UAE AI hub
Global tech giants unite for 1-Gigawatt Initiative, part of US-UAE AI cluster
◼ Google opens second AI First Accelerator for MENA & Türkiye
Google's twelve-week programme targets promising regional AI startups
Friday, May 23rd
🔊 Listen to Friday’s Daily News Minute
🔥 Made in UAE AI model hits 100 million monthly downloads
Falcons AI beats 1.7M AI models to become Hugging Face's most downloaded
🔥 MBZUAI opens Silicon Valley AI lab
MBZUAI's Foundation Models Institute now spans three global locations