Abu Dhabi deepens AI drive with global summit

Asset managers, investors, governments and artificial-intelligence companies from more than 60 countries are set to gather in Abu Dhabi next month as the emirate seeks to turn its growing investment in AI infrastructure and government applications into broader economic gains.

The AI Everything Abu Dhabi, taking place on October 6-7 at ADNEC Centre, will bring together more than 400 AI infrastructure builders, model makers, startups and unicorns, alongside more than 200 investors overseeing $91bn in assets, according to the organisers.

“Abu Dhabi will become the world’s first AI-native government next year, and the evidence is already clear in the way we’re redefining public services for millions of people and businesses,” Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at the Department of Government Enablement, said in an email.

“We have built the blueprint,” Lootah said, adding that Abu Dhabi is inviting the world to examine what intelligent governance looks like at scale.

More than 180 speakers are scheduled to take part in the summit, including Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mistral AI, Arthur Mensch, and Founder of Boston Dynamics, Marc Raibert. They will appear together in the UAE for the first time to discuss sovereign AI, new alliances and industrial applications of the technology.

The event comes as spending on AI accelerates globally. Businesses and governments are expected to spend about $2.59tn on AI this year, a 47 per cent increase from 2025, according to Gartner.

For Abu Dhabi, the summit is also an opportunity to showcase a government-led strategy that combines computing infrastructure, AI research and public-sector deployment.

More than 50 UAE government entities are participating, led by the Department of Government Enablement, Abu Dhabi, which is overseeing the emirate’s plan to become what it describes as the world’s first AI-native government by 2027.

The department has brought more than 40 government entities into a single AI-driven ecosystem, with more than 100 AI use cases already operating across public services. A $3.54bn investment programme supports the wider effort.

The government push is being matched by private-sector investment and infrastructure. Solutions+, a Mubadala company and the event’s global partner, is positioning AI deployment as an operational rather than purely technological challenge.

“At Solutions+, we help bridge national ambition with operational delivery by bringing together sovereign infrastructure, enterprise platforms, trusted partners, and the expertise required to embed AI into real services and workflows,” Managing Director of Solutions+, Nasir Al Nabhani, noted.

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He said agentic AI, combined with human oversight and accountability, can improve services, raise productivity and create measurable value.

G42, one of Abu Dhabi’s major AI companies, is also promoting what it calls an “Intelligence Grid”, a combination of computing infrastructure, platforms, AI agents and governance intended to support AI adoption across society.

“An AI-native society takes shape when intelligence becomes something people can depend on: getting care, running a business, accessing a public service,” Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at G42, Faheem Ahamed, stated. “The real measure of progress is how widely that possibility becomes everyday reality.”

The conference will feature companies across chips, cloud computing, enterprise software and AI infrastructure, including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Cerebras, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle and Snowflake. The organisers say the listed exhibitors have a combined market capitalisation of more than $10tn.

The CEO of Ai Everything, Trixie LohMirmand, said the focus is shifting from the speculative potential of AI towards its application in industries and public services.

“Beyond the speculative sheen of AI, its true impact lies in transforming science, services and society,” she said. Abu Dhabi is assembling infrastructure, research capabilities and international partnerships to turn AI ambition into national capacity, she added.

The emirate is also using the event to highlight its homegrown AI research. The Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, will present 23 demonstrations from nine research centres.

Among them is GeoAI, a machine-learning model designed to map subsurface geology in the northern UAE and support mineral exploration. TII will also showcase work spanning energy, materials, marine infrastructure, aerospace and autonomous systems.

Its Falcon family of large language models is built around the idea that model performance does not necessarily depend on ever-larger architectures. Falcon-H1 Arabic, trained on Arabic-language data using a purpose-built architecture, is currently ranked at the top of the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard, according to the organisation.

The event will also give investors access to a growing group of AI companies. Mistral AI, participating for the first time, recently raised €3bn ($3.49bn) in a Series D round that valued the French company at more than €21bn ($24.42bn).

“Control is becoming the defining topic in AI adoption,” Mistral’s Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa, Mohamed Zouari, said. The company is building that capability with Abu Dhabi organisations and will demonstrate its approach at the event, he said.