Your GCC AI Weekly

Like a friend who shares the news over tea — no jargon, no fluff, just what matters across the Gulf.

Ai MAJLiS Editions

ISSUE 15, 7 September 2026

Ai MAJLiS

Ahlan wa sahlan — welcome to Issue #015 of Ai MAJLiS. LEAP week has wrapped, and now comes the part that actually matters: turning handshakes into hardware and headlines into habits. HUMAIN closed out its LEAP run with three separate moves in four days — a 250-megawatt data centre with Together AI, a formal infrastructure pact with the Ministry of Communications, and word of a venture fund that could top $10 billion. Meanwhile the UAE picked up global bragging rights for something less flashy but arguably more important: it’s now ranked first in the world for AI adoption in government, with 99% of services already digitised. Oman quietly locked in a sovereign AI partnership of its own, giving a local firm exclusive access to a major Chinese model family. And two stories this week point at the same underlying truth — building all this compute takes real power, literally. Bahrain’s electricity minister put it plainly: the grid has to keep up, or none of this works. And BlackRock’s own strategists think the smart money increasingly agrees — Gulf capital is starting to stay home to build exactly that kind of infrastructure. Khawa’s hot. Let’s get into it.

This Week's Top Stories

01

[SAUDI ARABIA] - HUMAIN · Infrastructure · Venture Capital

HUMAIN's Big Week: A 250MW Data Centre, a Government Pact, and a $10 Billion Fund in the Making

LEAP 2026 may have closed its doors in Riyadh, but PIF-backed HUMAIN spent the days right after it announcing exactly what all that stage time was building toward. First, a joint venture with San Francisco’s Together AI to build a 250-megawatt AI data centre inside the Kingdom, with the two companies targeting more than $5 billion in annualised revenue in year one alone — HUMAIN bringing the infrastructure and capital, Together AI bringing the cloud platform and its global developer base. Then a formal partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to coordinate AI infrastructure planning and open a HUMAIN Academy for local talent. And now, CEO Tareq Amin says the company is preparing to launch a venture fund that could exceed $10 billion, with offices planned in the US, Saudi Arabia, France, and the UK.

250MW

New AI data centre with Together AI, inside the Kingdom

$5B+

Targeted annualised revenue in the venture's first year

$10B+

Potential size of HUMAIN's new global VC fund

"We don't do passive investments, that will never happen." The fund will back companies that commit to using Saudi data centres or relocating staff to the Kingdom — a new division, HUMAIN Limitless, is being carved out specifically to invest in Saudi AI companies.

— Tareq Amin, CEO, HUMAIN

Why it matters: This is what “Year of AI” looks like once the marketing wears off — a data centre with a revenue target attached, a government MOU with actual deliverables, and a fund designed to pull global AI companies physically into the Kingdom rather than just writing them cheques. If you’re a startup weighing where to put compute or headcount, HUMAIN just made the ask explicit: come build here, and there’s capital waiting for you if you do.

02

[UAE] - Digital Government · Rankings · Workforce

The UAE Just Topped the World in AI Adoption — Here's What Two Decades of Head Start Actually Bought It

The UAE now ranks first globally in AI adoption in government, digital skills, and institutional readiness for digital government — a position experts say traces back to a coordinated national technology push that started roughly two decades ago, long before “AI strategy” was a phrase anyone used. 99% of UAE government services are now digitally transformed, a shift that has already saved an estimated $4 billion while improving how services get delivered. The next target: powering half of all government services through agentic AI within two years, with 80,000 government staff currently being trained on the technology and a new AI curriculum rolling out across schools nationwide.

"They really are in pole position to move from a world-class digital government to the world's most intelligent government."

— Dr Raymond Khoury, Arthur D Little

Rankings like this rarely come from a single flashy announcement — they come from two decades of consistent digitisation before the AI wave even arrived, then layering agentic AI on top of infrastructure that already worked. The UAE didn’t skip steps; it’s cashing in on ones taken years ago.

Why it matters: For businesses working with UAE government entities, the direction of travel is now unambiguous — half of all services running on agentic AI within two years means procurement, licensing, and compliance interactions will increasingly happen through conversational, outcome-based systems rather than legacy portals. Vendors and partners should be building for that interface now.

03

[OMAN] - Sovereign AI · Partnership · Arabic Language

Oman Locks In an Exclusive Sovereign AI Partnership — With a Twist: The Model Comes From China

DeepAstra, a portfolio company of Omantel Innovation Labs, has been named the sole sovereign AI partner for Z.AI in Oman — an agreement revealed on the sidelines of LEAP 2026 and endorsed by Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. The deal gives DeepAstra access to Z.AI’s GLM family of models through KwnX, an integrated AI workspace covering research, planning, content creation, and software development, with the explicit goal of deploying AI that respects Oman’s own requirements for infrastructure, governance, and data control.

A planned Oman Sovereign AI Development Center will focus specifically on Arabic-language AI, model customisation, document intelligence, and sector-specific applications for Oman and the wider Arabic-speaking region — positioned within Omantel’s broader “Everyone AI” push to move AI out of pilot projects and into everyday commercial use.

Why it matters: This is a smaller Gulf market making a deliberate, narrow bet rather than trying to out-spend its neighbours — pick one serious foreign AI partner, keep the data and governance local, and build a specialised centre around Arabic-language capability. Watch for other mid-sized GCC markets to follow the same playbook: sovereignty over scale.

04

[Bahrain] - Energy · Infrastructure · Grid Capacity

Bahrain's Message to the Region: All This AI Ambition Runs on a Grid That Isn't Ready Yet

Bahrain’s electricity and water minister, Yasser bin Ibrahim Humaidan, used a regional energy forum this week to say out loud what a lot of Gulf AI strategies quietly gloss over: none of it works without power, and the grid needs to catch up fast. Energy storage, he argued, has to be treated as core infrastructure — not an afterthought — as data centres and AI workloads pile new demand onto systems that were sized for a different era.

+40%

Projected rise in Middle East power demand by 2035

165GW

GCC renewable capacity target by 2030

24GW

Renewable capacity actually installed today

"[The question is] whether our systems can scale generation, transmission and flexibility fast enough while remaining secure and sustainable."

— Yasser bin Ibrahim Humaidan, Minister of Electricity and Water Affairs, Bahrain

Bapco Energies and Acwa Power are already working on one practical answer: a joint solar-plus-battery-storage facility in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, with electricity earmarked for transmission across the causeway to Bahrain — a small preview of the cross-border energy sharing the region may need much more of.

Why it matters: Every GCC AI headline this year has been about chips, models, and capital — this is the reminder that the actual bottleneck may be watts, not GPUs. Businesses planning data centre or AI infrastructure investment in the region should be asking about grid capacity and power purchase agreements as seriously as they ask about compute availability.

05

[GCC WIDE] - Capital Markets · Investment Flows

BlackRock: Gulf Money That Used to Go Global Is Starting to Stay Home — and Build AI Infrastructure Instead

A new BlackRock analysis puts a number on a shift that’s been building for a while: as much as $2.1 trillion in GCC capital expenditure is projected by the end of the decade, and strategist Ben Powell argues an increasing share of that Gulf surplus will stay inside the region rather than flow into global markets the way it traditionally has. The reasoning is straightforward — diversification plans that were already underway are accelerating, and building domestic AI, energy, and data infrastructure has become one of the most attractive places to deploy that capital.

$2.1T

Projected GCC capital expenditure by decade's end

12%

Share of US electricity consumption data centres could reach by 2028

"The marginal dollar of Gulf Cooperation Council surplus will increasingly stay inside the region."

— Ben Powell, Chief Investment Strategist, BlackRock

Powell’s framing ties the trend to a broader convergence: AI infrastructure, energy security, and long-term self-sufficiency are increasingly being funded and planned together rather than as separate line items.

Why it matters: If sovereign capital that once went abroad is now being redirected into home-grown data centres, energy grids, and AI ventures, that’s exactly the kind of demand signal that supports this week’s other stories — from HUMAIN’s fund to Bahrain’s grid warning. For anyone raising capital or selling infrastructure into the region, the buyer pool just got a lot bigger, and more local.

GCC AI SNAPSHOT

Where Each Country Stands This Week

Fifteen editions in, and this week feels like the Gulf’s AI story growing up a little. The announcements haven’t stopped — HUMAIN alone made three in four days — but the tone has shifted from “look what we’re planning” to “here’s the revenue target, here’s the megawatt count, here’s the minister telling you where the real constraint is.” That’s a healthier conversation. A region that’s honest about needing more power before it can deliver more compute is a region taking this seriously enough to plan past the headline.

Oman’s move this week is a good reminder that not every country needs to out-spend Riyadh or Abu Dhabi to have a real AI story — a focused, sovereignty-first partnership can be just as meaningful as a mega-deal. And if BlackRock is right that Gulf capital is increasingly choosing to stay home, expect more of both: more infrastructure, and more of these smaller, deliberate bets alongside it.

That’s Issue #015. Shukran for reading — see you next Sunday. 🫖

— Your friend at Ai MAJLiS

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