The United Arab Emirates’ long-term investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to distinguish it from countries that primarily consume technology developed elsewhere.
A recent report from the World Bank places the UAE amongst a relatively small group of emerging economies developing sophisticated AI capabilities while attracting specialist talent and encouraging widespread adoption.
The wider report argues that AI could help developing economies achieve advances in a decade that previously might have taken considerably longer, particularly by improving productivity and addressing shortages of specialist skills.
The UAE Is Moving from AI Adoption to Development
The World Bank recommends a three-stage route for countries seeking to maximise AI’s economic potential – adopt existing technologies, adapt them to domestic requirements and eventually advance towards developing frontier capabilities.
The UAE has already made progress across all three stages.
The report highlights the Falcon family of large language models developed by Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), placing the UAE amongst a limited group of countries demonstrating the ability to build advanced foundation models.
Falcon is particularly significant because its open-source and open-weight approach allows developers and researchers to download and adapt models rather than depending entirely on proprietary systems developed by major international technology companies.
That capacity supports the UAE’s broader ambition to build a knowledge economy capable of generating technology domestically rather than relying exclusively on imported expertise.
It could have consequences across finance, healthcare, logistics, tourism and digital entertainment, where AI can increasingly automate routine processes while helping employees make faster decisions.
Consumer-facing sectors could benefit as data analysis improves personalisation, security and payment processing. Dubai casino online operators are amongst the parties who could profit from the UAE’s investment into AI.
The challenge will be converting sophisticated research and models into commercially valuable products used throughout the economy.
Global AI Talent Is Increasingly Moving to the UAE
Infrastructure alone cannot establish a sustainable AI industry, making the UAE’s ability to attract specialist workers another important part of the World Bank’s assessment.
According to the report, the country recorded one of the world’s highest net inflows of AI professionals per 10,000 LinkedIn members in 2025, alongside countries including Australia, Luxembourg, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland.
More strikingly, the UAE ranked first for positive net inflows of leading AI authors and inventors, with a score of 2.58 representing a substantial reversal from its historical position between 2011 and 2024.
The World Bank partly links that performance to long-term residency incentives designed to attract specialists in areas including machine learning, AI engineering and model development.
Developing domestic expertise is equally important, particularly as AI changes the skills required in existing occupations.
The UAE’s National Employment Strategy 2031 already identifies AI among the high-value sectors in which it wants greater participation from Emirati workers, alongside advanced science, digital transactions and technology.
The government has also incorporated AI literacy into its skills framework and appointed chief AI officers across federal entities, helping move the technology from a specialist field towards a broader organisational capability.
Building the Computing Power Behind the Ambition
One of the biggest obstacles to AI development is the enormous infrastructure required to train and operate increasingly sophisticated models.
The World Bank warns that inadequate power, internet connectivity, computing resources, data and skills could prevent many economies from capturing AI’s benefits.
The UAE is attempting to turn those potential constraints into competitive advantages.
One of its largest projects is Stargate UAE, a planned 1-gigawatt AI infrastructure cluster being developed within the wider 5GW UAE-US AI Campus in Abu Dhabi.
The project brings together G42, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank, with the first 200MW phase under development.
Such capacity could give companies and researchers based in the Emirates greater access to the computing resources required for advanced AI while making the country attractive to international technology businesses seeking infrastructure in the Middle East.
It also strengthens the connection between the UAE’s AI ambitions and its wider economic diversification programme.
The UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, originally launched in 2017, explicitly seeks to increase productivity, support private-sector initiatives, strengthen research and development and create a new market with significant economic value.
Meanwhile, the wider We the UAE 2031 strategy targets an increase in national GDP from AED1.49 trillion to AED3 trillion, making productivity-enhancing technologies potentially important to achieving that ambition.
