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The Emirates Intelligencer

An Independent Daily Bulletin on Artificial-Intelligence Investment, Adoption and Deployment. Published by otonomi.co

Vol. I., No. 99 Sunday, October 11, 2026 From the Archive
National Infrastructure
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Etisalat to Lift International Connectivity More Than Twenty-Fivefold for AI

The country's largest telecoms group has committed to an AI-era network build-out that it says will put the Emirates' data-carrying capacity at the scale its compute ambitions demand.

By The Otonomi Investment Desk

Etisalat group has launched a project to expand its digital infrastructure inside the United Arab Emirates and abroad, with plans to raise international connectivity capacity to more than 500 terabits per second by 2030, an increase of over twenty-five times its present capacity of about 20 terabits per second. The announcement was made in Abu Dhabi in the presence of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the Presidential Court, who was briefed on the plans in his capacity as chairman of the Emirates Investment Authority, the main shareholder in the group.

The project will develop diverse, low-latency routes intended to serve the UAE's AI campuses, global cloud providers and the group's operations across its markets. Jassem Mohamed Bu Ataba Alzaabi, chairman of etisalat group, said the country should not simply adopt artificial intelligence but govern it and build with it, and that moving international connectivity from 20 to more than 500 terabits per second addresses the growing demands of AI on global data flows while safeguarding digital sovereignty.

The initiative is the group's first major commitment under a new strategy built around four business engines: telecoms, AI and business solutions, infrastructure, and fintech. It was announced during etisalat's fiftieth-anniversary events, at which the group set out a new vision to become an AI-powered and AI-enabling operator and to continue under the etisalat name. The group operates across 38 countries and serves more than 250 million subscribers.

etisalat Read original source

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Digital Economy

Dubai's Cashless Strategy Beats Its 2026 Target Ahead of Schedule

Dubai Finance has reported that the Dubai Cashless Strategy, launched by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in October 2024, has exceeded its key targets ahead of its scheduled two-year timeframe. The emirate's cashless transactions index reached 90.1 per cent, against a 90 per cent target set for 2026, while the digital enablement index for the government sector reached 100 per cent, reflecting the availability of digital payment methods across institutions and businesses.

The strategy's final report, presented to the Dubai Strategic Affairs Council, said cashless payment initiatives had contributed more than AED8 billion to the emirate's economy. Government cashless collections reached 99.66 per cent during the first half of 2026, and Dubai Finance has established more than 70 partnerships with public bodies and private businesses. Sheikh Hamdan said the results reflected a model built on a clear vision, integrated roles between the government and private sectors, and the expanding use of technology to serve people and raise economic competitiveness.

Dubai Media Office Read original source
Sovereign AI

Abu Dhabi's TII Releases Falcon Models Built for the Emirati Dialect

The Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Research Council, has launched three artificial intelligence models that it says bring Emirati language and culture within reach of developers, researchers and everyday users. Falcon-Emirati is a seven-billion-parameter language model purpose-built for Emirati Arabic, and it was released alongside Falcon-ASR, a compact speech recognition model, and Falcon-OCR-Arabic, which extracts Arabic text and structured content from images and documents.

Built on Falcon-H1-Arabic, Falcon-Emirati scored 84.83 per cent on Alyah, a native Emirati benchmark covering everyday language, figurative expressions, heritage knowledge and poetry, outperforming every Arabic and multilingual open-source model evaluated in TII's own comparison. Faisal Al Bannai, advisor to the UAE President for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs and secretary-general of ATRC, said the models put the country's knowledge and expertise behind the belief that its language belongs in the future it is building. Falcon-Emirati is available through TII's Falcon Chat platform.

Gulf News Read original source
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Further Dispatches
Enterprise AI

GBM Opens What It Calls the UAE's First AI Lab With Cisco and Nvidia

Gulf Business Machines has launched what it describes as the UAE's first AI Lab, built on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. The Dubai-based technology provider said the facility will give organisations across the Gulf Cooperation Council a controlled environment to test secure, on-premises and hybrid AI use cases, and to address sovereign requirements such as data residency, regulatory compliance, security and low-latency processing.

GBM said the lab could compress AI deployment timelines from months to weeks, using Cisco's pre-validated modular infrastructure together with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and monitoring of AI workloads and agent activity. Pieter Bil, chief executive of GBM, said the company had turned established technology frameworks into secure, locally managed platforms tailored for the Gulf. The announcement did not specify the lab's location, customer eligibility or any fee for access.

Zawya Read original source
Sovereign Manufacturing

Kerno and SAAL.ai to Build a Sovereign AI Stack Entirely in the UAE

Kerno, a UAE-based manufacturer of enterprise information technology infrastructure, and SAAL.ai, a UAE developer of data platform and agentic AI solutions, have signed a memorandum of understanding at Ai Everything 2026 to co-develop and deploy an integrated Sovereign AI-in-a-Box solution that is engineered, manufactured and supported entirely in the country.

The partners said the platform combines enterprise compute, operating environments, container technologies and tailored AI models in a single deployment-ready architecture, with customers retaining ownership and control of their data, models and infrastructure. Kerno will supply the hardware and support layer while SAAL.ai provides the intelligence layer. The companies said the collaboration would build Emirati expertise across hardware engineering, manufacturing and AI development, reducing reliance on foreign supply chains and offshore support.

Gulf News Read original source
Global AI in Action
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