ABU DHABI — Hakim Hacid is a man in demand. Stationed under the huge chandeliers of Abu Dhabi’s St. Regis hotel, an army of consultants and liveried waiters at his command, the French-Algerian scientist holds one council after another with experts from the world of artificial intelligence.
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They include heavyweights from the semiconductor industry, prominent academics, executives from Amazon, Meta and Google, founders of trendy start-ups and investors with deep pockets. All have been invited as part of a conference on AI organized at the end of November by the Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute (TII), whose research work is led by Hacid.
In his 40s, Hacid, who studied in Lyon and Orsay and began his career at Alcatel-Lucent, flew to the Gulf in 2014. With virtually unlimited resources at his disposal, he led the development of Falcon, the first “large-scale language model” (LLM) designed entirely in the United Arab Emirates. The power of this AI algorithmic model rivals those of Silicon Valley, such as OpenAI’s famous ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or their Chinese competitors. Other versions in Hindi, Farsi, Swahili and Urdu are in the pipeline.
A strategy of influence
Published in free access on the internet, this model inaugurates the Emirates’ new strategy of influence: providing Africa and the Middle East with the tools to seize the AI revolution.
“Falcon is a national jewel of strategic importance. It enables the Emirates to guarantee their digital sovereignty, and not to depend on foreign algorithms in the AI race. The aim is then to propagate this infrastructure throughout the region,” Hacid says between social gatherings.
With this initial success under their belts, the researcher and his teams are now looking to export their model. All the pomp and circumstances of the Emirati princes are devoted to this task. Guests at the St. Regis conference are treated to business-class airfares, private chauffeurs, a gala dinner, nights in luxury hotels and a casual barbecue in a minister’s garden. European participants are stunned.
The Emirates’ efforts in AI are very, very significant.
“It’s incredible what’s happening here. The Emirates’ efforts in AI are very, very significant. Our governments would do well to learn from them, at the risk of being crushed by the U.S. and China,” says Philip Torr, one of Oxford University’s leading AI specialists.
“It’s refreshing to see that a country of modest size can, by political will and risk-taking, set itself apart from Chinese or American tech. The Emirates’ voluntarism underlines the fact that France lacks any real national ambition,” adds Nicolas Granatino, a French venture capitalist close to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In the big leagues
The Emirates are now playing in the big league of AI. When Donald Trump returned to the White House and unveiled his Stargate project to raise 0 billion for American AI, he brought together four partners: OpenAI, the Japanese group SoftBank, the giant Oracle and MGX, Abu Dhabi’s wealth fund specializing in AI.
Created in March 2024 and endowed with 0 billion, this Emirati fund has already become unmissable. After acquiring stakes in OpenAI and in Elon Musk’s company xAI, it joined forces with Microsoft and asset manager BlackRock to invest tens of billions of dollars in data centers and semiconductors. He is also at the heart of the framework agreement recently signed with France, which includes plans to build “the largest artificial intelligence campus in Europe” in France.
MGX is also working to produce the precious chips directly on its soil. The Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, which enjoys a virtual monopoly in high end microprocessors, is reportedly considering the construction of a gigafactory in the Emirates. The realization of the project would be a tour de force: TSMC has only agreed once to relocate its production outside of Taiwan, to Arizona.
When the company landed in Phoenix in 2021, it came up against a shortage of skilled workers. A move to the Emirates would be less chaotic, as the country already boasts more than a hundred start-ups and 20,000 computer scientists specialized in AI, many of whom are employed by G42, the national flagship responsible for providing Falcon with outlets in healthcare, aeronautics, energy and communications sectors.
The Emirati princes the modern version of the Medicis.
The success story started in the summer 2017. The computer architecture forming the basis of modern AI, dubbed the “transformer,” had just been invented by Google engineers. The Emirati princes immediately understood the significance of the invention. Omar al Olama, a 27-year-old civil servant, was appointed minister of AI — a world first.
“As the region is unstable in terms of security, local authorities had long been using surveillance technologies involving large amounts of data. AI was a natural extension,” says Patrick Thiriet, a French venture capitalist who has been living in the Emirates for almost 20 years. Armed with unlimited petrodollars, the young minister rolled out the red carpet for the world’s artificial intelligence elite.
“Our strategy was based on four pillars: acquiring state-of-the-art equipment; opening research laboratories; attracting foreign talents with dream living conditions; and offering entrepreneurs the funds they needed to develop,” says Alessandro Borgogna, an Italian ex-consultant who oversees the Abu Dhabi agency responsible for attracting foreign investments. “You have to give the Emirati princes credit for having a vision very early on. They’re the modern version of the Medicis, who attracted the greatest minds of their time to Florence.”
Recruiting abroad
Will the Emirates remain an AI haven for long? There are several obstacles on the horizon. First, the ecosystem relies exclusively on foreign brains. Despite the creation in 2019 of a university dedicated to AI — again, a first in the world — the Emirati computer whiz kid remains a rare bird.
“Finding the workforce is a huge challenge. We’re recruiting from all over the world,” says Faheem Ahamed, one of G42’s directors. France is a prime breeding ground, so much so that a joke is circulating in Abu Dhabi: The Falcon’s DNA is actually that of a roster. Hacid has made a specialty of recruiting directly from French schools.
“The salaries offered here have nothing to do with France, so it was a no-brainer,” says a young Parisian engineer, freshly arrived at the Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute.
The Emirati tech scene therefore threatens to collapse in the event of a geopolitical upheaval, just like Kuwait, which never recovered its luster after the first Gulf War. “The Emirati academic scene is not yet on par with the country’s global ambitions. There is a shortage of local talent in the technology field, and the ecosystem still relies heavily on expatriates. This will take time, as we need to train a whole generation,” says a long-standing European investor in Dubai.
“A little more patience”
The colossal sums injected into the state-of-the-art equipment are also slow to materialize in the Emirates’ economy. Ministers and public companies, which have been ordered to integrate the Falcon into their systems, seem to be struggling to move beyond the experimental stage.
A good example is M42, a showcase for the country’s biotechnology. With its gleaming machines and thousands of employees, the company is responsible for sequencing the entire genome of the Emirati population, almost 1 million people. A colossal task, which could revolutionize fundamental biology. But AI remains powerless to exploit the mountain of data collected.
“Algorithmic models are still too general to undertake such a complex mission,” says Albarah El Khani, one of M42’s executives. At this stage, Falcon is limited to optimizing medical records.
This challenge of commercializing AI is not unique to Abu Dhabi. In 2024, major US technology companies alone invested 4 billion in AI, for less than billion in revenue generated by the use of algorithms. According to a recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group, AI produces added value for only 4% of global companies. Only a fraction of the hundred or so Emirati AI start-ups have raised significant amounts of capital.
“AI is a wave — some would say a bubble — but the real technological revolution is just around the corner. Just a little more patience,” pleads Andrew Jackson, director of Inception, a G42 subsidiary tasked with training Falcon for more precise industrial applications.
A warning shot
To maintain Florence’s wealth and autonomy, the Medici dynasty had to contend with the rival city-states of Milan and Venice, the influence of the papacy, and the appetites of the French kings. Five centuries later, Abu Dhabi’s ruling family faces similar challenges. Sitting at the table of the AI greats is not without diplomatic consequences.
The Emirates find themselves dependent on a new kind of geopolitics, one that pits Beijing against Washington in the technology field. The first warning shot came in the fall of 2023. In full expansion, G42 wanted to acquire the latest-generation graphics processor from the Californian firm Nvidia, the global leader in these chips used to train AI algorithms.
But the CIA was concerned about the risk of technology transfer to China. According to its spies, G42 and its boss, the Chinese-American Peng Xiao, are too close to Beijing. Emirati data centers are brimming with components manufactured by Huawei, the Chinese giant under U.S. sanctions since 2019. Mohammed bin Zayed University, dedicated to AI, is said to cultivate close ties with Chinese campuses. In January 2024, the U.S. Congress demanded the imposition of trade restrictions on G42.
Choosing sides
Abu Dhabi is in a panic. G42 sold all its holdings in Chinese companies and undertook a spectacular sweep of its subsidiaries.
“In just a few days, we got rid of all the Chinese technologies installed in the building. Not only the components inside the computers and servers, but also surveillance cameras, code locks and even our personal phones!, says Odai Alkawamlh, director of a cathedral-sized data center located not far from Abu Dhabi airport.
After keeping Beijing and Washington at arm’s length for a long time, Abu Dhabi’s ruling family is now leaning toward the West. It remains to be seen whether this marriage of convenience will enable the Emirates to increase their weight in global AI.
The Americans won’t let the region become too important in the semiconductor value chain.
Belgacem Haba, an Algerian scientist and businessman considered one of the “fathers” of the semiconductor industry, is skeptical. “I doubt the U.S. will let TSMC set up shop in the Gulf. The Americans won’t let the region become too important in the semiconductor value chain. They don’t want to replace a dependence on Taipei by a dependence on Abu Dhabi,” he says on the sidelines of the conference at the St. Regis.
Last April, G42 raised .5 billion from Microsoft. Although the Emirati champion has severed its ties with the Middle Kingdom, Republican senators have called for a new “special investigation” into the company’s links with Beijing. Emirati technological sovereignty in the field of AI remains relative. After all, Florence was not built in eight years.
