#UAE #investment - Scale AI this week announced its new UAE entity registered at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), completing a swift two-year expansion that anchors the San Francisco-based AI firm inside the GCC’s three largest digital economies. Launched during the Dubai AI Festival, the new operation brings Scale AI’s regional team to over 130 staff across the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, positioning the $29 billion company to supply training data, evaluation frameworks, and full-stack systems directly to the region's top sovereign and enterprise entities.
SO WHAT? — Scale AI took under two years to expand its Gulf footprint from Qatar, into both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. While few commercial details have been made public outside of Qatar—where its five-year Ministry of CIT contract has already delivered daily-use public applications and trained nearly 6,000 people—Scale AI’s rapid regional headcount growth to over 130 staff signals strong confidence in its Middle East business pipeline. Early partnerships with the G42 group could prove instrumental in unlocking UAE public-sector and enterprise opportunities, positioning the San Francisco firm to continue building regional momentum.
KEY POINTS:
Scale AI formally launched its UAE entity at the Dubai AI Festival this week, which was registered at Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) in June under the name of Scale AI ME Limited.
More than 30 people now work for Scale AI in the UAE, with a total Gulf headcount which now exceeds 130 (according to the latest LinkedIn data). The company opened its first regional operations in Qatar in early 2025, adding an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia later the same year.
Founded in 2016, Scale AI provides the training data, model evaluations and red-teaming, and full-stack AI systems that help frontier labs, enterprises and governments build, deploy and oversee reliable AI.
In Qatar, Scale AI says it has trained or upskilled nearly 6,000 people, and government applications it built there are now in everyday use by the public.
Qatar’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology signed a five-year deal with Scale AI in February 2025 to improve government services. The agreement covers more than 50 AI applications for public sector use.
Meanwhile, under an MoU signed earlier this month, Scale AI and Presight will explore building agentic AI applications for government and enterprise customers in the UAE and other agreed markets. Successful outputs could become repeatable offerings for government entities across the region.
The two companies plan to pair agent development with evaluation frameworks that keep checking accuracy, reliability and performance once agents are live. They will also examine how simulation can test emergency scenarios and decisions before real-world deployment.
Last year, Scale AI signed an agreement with another G42 company, Inception (now Inception42), covering enterprise AI solutions and industry-specific evaluation datasets.
The company lists Meta, Cisco, Instacart, Nvidia, Cohere, OpenAI, Microsoft and Time as clients, along with the US Air Force and US Army.
ZOOM OUT - Scale AI is a San Francisco-based data and AI applications company that grew from $250 million in revenue in 2022 to an estimated $2 billion in 2025. Meta’s $14.3 billion investment for a 49 percent stake lifted its valuation above $29 billion, though Google, OpenAI and Microsoft left afterwards. The company is moving from data labelling into higher-margin applications for enterprises and governments, and its international public-sector revenue doubled in 2025. It expects that to double again in 2026, no doubt with a significant contribution from its growing Gulf business.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Scale AI, MEAN, various
Read more about Scale AI:
Qatar signs 5-year deal with Scale AI (Middle East AI News)
Scale AI to open Riyadh office, following regional deals (Middle East AI News)