Like a friend who shares the news over tea — no jargon, no fluff, just what matters across the Gulf.
Ai MAJLiS Editions
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ISSUE 16, 14 September 2026
Ai MAJLiS
- UAE
- SAUDI ARABIA
- QATAR
- KUWAIT
- BAHRAIN
- OMAN
Yallah ahlan — welcome to Issue #016 of Ai MAJLiS. This week the Gulf’s AI story pointed in two directions at once: outward and downward. Outward, because the UAE just pledged roughly €40 billion to Germany — with a full gigawatt of that earmarked for data centres — and Saudi Arabia’s tech minister spent the week in Silicon Valley telling founders, in plain terms, to bring their AI companies to the Kingdom. Downward, because Oman quietly posted one of the best growth numbers we’ve seen all year: its count of homegrown AI companies nearly doubled in twelve months. And in between the mega-deals, Qatar hosted Arab policy leaders in Doha to work on something less glamorous but arguably more important — shared rules for how AI actually gets governed — while Bahrain’s biggest telecom made agentic AI a one-click purchase for local businesses. Big capital, big compute, and small businesses getting their first real shot at AI, all in the same week. We’re also circling back to a story worth a proper look: earlier this month, MBZUAI open-sourced K2 Horizon, six AI models released with full training data and methodology attached — not just the weights. Khawa’s hot. Let’s get into it.
01
[UAE] - Investment · Data Centres · Tech Diplomacy
The UAE Just Pledged €40 Billion to Germany — and a Fifth of a Gigawatt of That Is Pure Data Centre
During a state visit on September 10, UAE President HH Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz signed off on a joint declaration committing the UAE to invest roughly €40 billion (about $46 billion) into Germany — on top of some €34 billion already in the country. The centrepiece isn’t factories or real estate: it’s “advanced digital infrastructure,” specifically new data centres with a combined capacity of approximately 1 gigawatt, alongside a formal commitment to expand UAE-Germany cooperation on artificial intelligence and emerging technology, including joint research. The two countries also floated something genuinely new — “Data Embassies,” a proposed legal model for hosting a nation’s data and information systems on another country’s soil, which officials are calling a new form of technology diplomacy.
€40B
Total UAE investment pledge to Germany (~$46B)
1GW
Data centre capacity earmarked in the package
29
Corporate agreements signed alongside it, worth €9.3B+
"[This] reflects our ambition to invest in that relationship" — with data centres, according to Berlin officials, expected to "partly pay for" themselves through the capacity the investment builds.
— HE Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology
Why it matters: This is Gulf sovereign capital choosing to build AI infrastructure outside the Gulf — a sign that UAE investors see European compute capacity, not just domestic mega-projects, as core to their AI strategy. For European partners, it’s also a live test case for how comfortable governments are hosting Gulf-owned data under a new “embassy” legal model — a structure worth watching if your business sits anywhere near cross-border data hosting or sovereign cloud.
02
[SAUDI ARABIA] - Compute · Investment · Silicon Valley
Saudi Arabia's Pitch to Silicon Valley: We'll Bring the Chips, the Cash, and the Customers
Saudi Communications and IT Minister HE Abdullah Al-Swaha spent this week in Silicon Valley making the Kingdom’s case to AI founders directly, laying out three things on offer: computing capacity, capital, and market access. On infrastructure, Saudi Arabia is planning more than 14 gigawatts of AI computing capacity built with the private sector — sized to cut costs for companies that set up there rather than rent capacity elsewhere. As proof it isn’t just a pitch deck, Al-Swaha pointed to xAI’s Grok, now deployed through Humain, as an example of a major foreign AI lab already choosing Saudi infrastructure for its build-out. The trip included meetings with General Catalyst, Supermicro, and Arcee AI to explore further investment and infrastructure ties, part of a wider push to expand generative AI, AI agents, and augmented-reality applications into healthcare, government, transport, and logistics.
14GW+
Planned AI computing capacity, built with private sector
3
Resources pitched: computing capacity, capital, market access
Why it matters: Every Gulf country is chasing AI companies, but Saudi Arabia’s pitch this week was unusually concrete — a specific gigawatt figure, a named reference customer in Grok, and a minister doing the selling in person rather than through a press release. If you’re an AI company weighing where to put your next training cluster, this is what “come build here” sounds like when a government means it.
03
[QATAR] - AI Governance · Regional Cooperation
Doha Just Hosted the Arab World's First Real Attempt at Shared AI Policy
Over three days in early September, Ooredoo Group, the UNDP, and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies — with GSMA and Women in AI as partners — convened a High-Level Digital & AI Policy Leaders Forum in Doha, drawing ministers and officials from Qatar, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, and Iraq. The forum built on a Digital Policy Framework launched at MWC Doha the year before, working through the practical gaps countries keep hitting on connectivity, digital infrastructure, AI governance, data governance, and financial inclusion. It closed with a proposal for a new “UNDP Arab Digital Policy Framework Facility” — a regional platform meant to offer policy intelligence, diagnostics, expertise, and implementation support so governments can move from frameworks on paper to coordinated action.
$21–35B
AI's estimated potential annual contribution to GCC GDP, with sound policy
1.5%
GDP boost from a 10% rise in fixed broadband penetration
5+
Arab countries represented at the Doha forum
"Digital transformation can create enormous economic and social value for our region, but technology alone is not enough."
— Hilal Mohammed al-Khulaifi, Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer, Ooredoo Group
Why it matters: Infrastructure and investment headlines dominate GCC AI coverage, but governance gaps are what actually slow adoption down. If this proposed regional facility gets funded and staffed, it could save individual Arab governments years of trial and error on AI rules — and companies operating across multiple Arab markets may eventually face more harmonised compliance requirements instead of a patchwork of one-off national policies.
04
[Bahrain] - Agentic AI · Enterprise · Telecom
Bahrain's Enterprises Just Got a Local Shortcut to Agentic AI
MENA-focused AI startup Velents, which builds autonomous digital agents for enterprise use, signed a strategic agreement with stc Bahrain at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh to bring exclusive AI product bundles to Bahraini businesses. The deal folds Velents’ agentic AI technology directly into stc Bahrain’s B2B ecosystem, meaning local companies can license sovereign AI tools through their existing telecom relationship rather than negotiating with an overseas vendor. It’s Velents’ third regional market, following earlier expansions into Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
"AI should run wherever regulation requires, in the language the customer actually speaks."
— Mohamed Gaber, CEO, Velents
Why it matters: For Bahraini SMEs without an in-house AI team, distribution through the country’s dominant telecom lowers the barrier to actually trying automation — no overseas procurement process required. It’s also a template other GCC telcos may copy: partner with a nimble regional AI vendor instead of building agentic tooling from scratch.
05
[OMAN] - Startups · Ecosystem Growth
Oman's AI Startup Scene Just Nearly Doubled — In a Single Year
The number of AI companies registered in Oman climbed from 22 to 42 between August 2025 and August 2026 — a 91% jump — according to the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. Officials point to the surge as evidence that the country’s broader digital-transformation push is translating into actual company formation, not just pilot projects: these startups are automating processes, improving data-driven decision-making, and building homegrown technical expertise across both government and private-sector work. The ministry says it’s now developing better metrics to track investment and sector growth going forward, while encouraging Omani AI firms to take part in international tech events to reach regional and global markets.
42
AI companies registered in Oman, as of August 2026
22
This time last year
91%
Year-over-year growth
Why it matters: A near-doubling of AI companies in one of the Gulf’s smaller markets suggests Oman’s sovereignty-first approach — including the DeepAstra/Z.AI tie-up we covered last issue — is creating room for local founders, not just foreign mega-projects. It’s worth watching as a bellwether for whether GCC AI investment is trickling down into real company formation, or staying parked in headline infrastructure deals.
06
[UAE] - Open-Source AI · Research · Foundation Models
MBZUAI Just Open-Sourced Six AI Models — Including One That Runs on a Smartwatch
On September 3, the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence unveiled K2 Horizon through its Institute of Foundation Models — a fleet of six AI models the university calls the largest “fully open” release in AI history. Unlike most “open” models, which stop at publishing weights, K2 Horizon ships the full stack: code, training data, and methodology, letting outside researchers inspect and rebuild exactly how each model was trained. The six models span from 0.9 billion parameters — small enough to run on a smartwatch — up to 375 billion parameters, and are already downloadable across Hugging Face, Ollama, Unsloth, and MBZUAI’s own IFM Repository.
6
Models released as part of the K2 Horizon fleet
0.9B–375B
Parameter range — smartwatch scale to frontier scale
4
Platforms hosting the release, incl. Hugging Face & Ollama
"The most important technology of our time should be built with the world, not kept from it."
— Prof Eric Xing, President, MBZUAI
Why it matters: Most “open” AI releases only hand over the weights; K2 Horizon also hands over the training data and methodology, which is what actually lets regional developers audit and adapt a frontier-scale model rather than just call it through an API. For GCC startups and researchers, that’s a genuine, homegrown alternative to building exclusively on closed US or Chinese model APIs.
GCC AI SNAPSHOT
Where Each Country Stands This Week
Sixteen editions in, and this week made the two-speed nature of GCC AI pretty visible. On one end, the numbers are enormous and the deals are signed between heads of state — a €40 billion pledge, a 14-gigawatt compute buildout, ministers doing sales calls in Palo Alto. On the other end, the real story might be smaller and steadier: 20 new AI companies registered in Oman in a year, and Bahraini businesses one phone call away from their first agentic AI tool through a telecom they already use. Both matter. The mega-deals build the runway; the small numbers tell you whether anyone’s actually taking off.
Qatar’s policy forum this week is worth sitting with too — it’s easy for governance conversations to get lost next to gigawatt announcements, but shared rules are what let all this infrastructure actually scale across borders instead of stalling at each one. Expect more of these quieter, cooperative moves alongside the next big number.
That’s Issue #016. See you then — inshallah.🫖
