Nvidia challenger Positron opens first global office at DIFC
Unicorn inference infrastructure company targets MENA sovereign AI deployments
#UAE #infrastructure – Nevada-based AI inference infrastructure company Positron AI, which has raised over $300 million with a valuation of more than $1 billion, has established its first presence outside the United States at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The DIFC licence marks the opening move in a planned regional expansion, with further offices across the Middle East to follow. Positron builds specialised AI inference hardware designed to deliver the lowest cost per token, higher memory density and improved energy efficiency compared to conventional GPU-based systems, positioning it as a direct challenger to Nvidia in the inference infrastructure market.
SO WHAT? – Positron AI announced its new focus on the Middle East and North Africa earlier this year along with the conclusion of its $230 million Series B funding announcement. Mitesh Agrawal delivering the news personally at the Web Summit Qatar in February, revealing that QIA had made a strategic investment in the company. Positron appointed Husni Khuffash (ex-Aixplain, EY and Microsoft) in December to drive its MENA business. As its first office outside the USA, the opening of the unicorn’s office in DIFC both underscores its commitment to the region and shows that it is moving fast to grasp the growing inference opportunity.
KEY POINTS:
Positron AI has announced its first office outside the USA at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), marking a key milestone in the company’s global expansion and presence in the Middle East and North Africa. The company says that further offices across the region are planned to follow.
The company has raised over $300 million in total funding, including a $230 million Series B round co-led by ARENA Private Wealth, Jump Trading and Unless, with strategic investments from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), UK semiconductor designer Arm Holdings, and impact investment firm Helena.
Positron’s current shipping product, the Atlas server, is designed to deliver LLM inference for small and medium-sized models up to 500 billion active parameters at performance levels comparable to Nvidia’s DGX-H100 systems, but at lower power consumption and cost.
Positron’s next-generation product, Titan, is due for delivery in the first quarter of 2027 and is built around the Asimov chip. The company claims it will deliver five times better energy efficiency and six times more memory capacity than Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin GPU.
The Asimov chip is designed around a memory-first architecture, targeting 2 terabytes of memory per accelerator and over 100 terabytes at rack scale. The new product directly addresses the reality that modern AI workloads are increasingly constrained by memory bandwidth rather than raw compute performance.
Jump Trading co-led the Series B after first deploying Atlas as a customer, reporting roughly three times lower end-to-end latency than comparable Nvidia H100-based systems on evaluated inference workloads in a production-ready, air-cooled footprint.
Positron’s DIFC presence positions it to engage with enterprise, financial services and government clients across the region. It joins an ecosystem where AI is being embedded widely into enterprise workflows, compliance systems and financial services delivery.
DIFC’s AI Campus ecosystem provided the destination for Positron’s regional base, with DIFC’s Innovation Hub CEO Mohammad Alblooshi describing the company’s approach as aligned with the centre’s evolution into an AI-native jurisdiction and its ambition to set a global benchmark for AI governance.
ZOOM OUT – Positron AI’s arrival at DIFC comes at a time the global financial centre is transforming its ecosystem. In April 2026, DIFC announced its ambition to become the world’s first AI-native financial centre, embedding AI across its legal frameworks, regulatory systems, business operations, talent development and physical district infrastructure. DIFC forecasts $3.5 billion in economic value and 25,000 new jobs as a result of its AI-native goals. The centre aims to redesign the operating model of an entire financial jurisdiction around AI, including governance frameworks covering AI agents and robotics. By 2030, a substantial portion of the DIFC district is planned to feature intelligent buildings, autonomous mobility, service robotics and digital twins.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: DIFC, Positron AI, MEAIN
Read more about Positron AI in MENA:
QIA takes part in Positron $230M Series B funding round (Middle East AI News)