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Hamdan bin Mohammed inaugurates Dubai AI Campus cluster at the DIFC Innovation Hub

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DIFC

His Highness: We prioritise Dubai’s competitiveness and leading position as a hub for the digital economy in all projects and programmes we launch, in line with goals of the D33
– We are confident this campus will be a key addition to Dubai’s economy by hosting hundreds of businesses and offering thousands of jobs over the next few years
– Move is part of phase one of the DUB.AI programme launched with the aim of accelerating AI adoption across all relevant sectors
– Phase one of the campus has already drawn more than 75 businesses while phase two is set to attract over 500 companies
His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai and Chairman of the Higher Committee for Future Technology and Digital Economy, today inaugurated the Dubai AI Campus cluster at the Innovation Hub, Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).
The move is part of phase one of the annual Dubai Universal Blueprint for Artificial Intelligence (DUB.AI), which was recently launched with the aim of accelerating AI adoption across all relevant sectors, thus creating the optimal nurturing ecosystem for AI businesses and talents to drive innovation in AI.   
Sheikh Hamdan said that Dubai continues to launch strategic plans with the aim of accelerating the adoption of AI and its applications in all sectors in line with the vision and directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to establish Dubai as a global hub of the digital economy and the preferred destination for major AI businesses and top talent from around the world.  
“Our efforts continue to harness the huge potential of advanced technology. The Dubai AI Campus at DIFC is a key step towards achieving our goals of doubling economic growth and increasing AI’s contribution to Dubai and the UAE’s GDP. We are confident this campus will be a key addition to Dubai’s economy by hosting hundreds of businesses and offering thousands of jobs over the next few years, further cementing Dubai’s standing as a favourite destination for tech companies,” His Highness said.  
“We prioritise Dubai’s competitiveness and leading position as a hub for the digital economy in all projects and programmes we launch, in line with goals of the Dubai Economic Agenda (D33). Today we move steadily towards a new era of leadership and sustainable growth of Dubai’s economy, which is based on knowledge, innovation, and future tech applications. Dubai will always remain a beacon of economic prosperity, regionally and globally, and the preferred choice of innovative minds,” he added.  

Region’s top AI destination
Announced in 2023, the Dubai AI Campus is the largest dedicated cluster of AI and advanced tech in the MENA region.  
The launch contributes to boosting the objectives of Dubai Economic Agenda (D33), including generating an average AED 100 billion annually for Dubai’s economy through digital transformation. Furthermore, it marks another landmark initiative in realising the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid to establish Dubai as a global hub of the digital economy and a key player on the global digital landscape.  
The new campus also aligns with Dubai’s vision to emerge as the chosen destination among tech businesses and will drive its contribution to innovation and tech integration across all sectors. It is estimated that AI will contribute $230 billion to the Middle East’s economy by 2030, while making up 14% of the UAE’s GDP by 2030.  
The inaugural ceremony was attended by His Excellency Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications; His Excellency Issa Kazim, Governor of the Dubai International Financial Centre; and Arif Amiri, CEO of the DIFC Authority.
The Dubai AI Campus cluster will be part of the DIFC Innovation Hub, which offers dedicated co-working spaces to tech startups, including AI businesses. Phase one of the campus is already complete with more than 75 businesses registered on a 10,000-square-foot campus. Phase two of the campus will extend over 100,000 square feet and is set to attract over 500 companies creating more than 3,000 jobs by 2028.  

A global hub
His Excellency Essa Kazim welcomed His Highness Sheikh Hamdan to the opening of the Dubai AI Campus, saying the cluster will accelerate the realisation of goals of the Dubai Economic Agenda while supporting future technology and digital economy strategies of the emirate.  
 “The opening of Dubai AI Campus is part of the first phase of the annual Dubai Universal Blueprint for Artificial Intelligence (DUB.AI), acting as a key enabler that will bolster Dubai’s position as a global hub accelerating the adoption of advanced technology,” he said.  

Easy investor access
“Through Dubai and DIFC’s innovative structure, startups have direct access to investors, investment funds, major corporations and traditional financial institutions. This ensures that high-potential businesses receive the necessary funding needed to achieve their goals,” HE Essa Kazim added.  

Catalyst for fintech ecosystem
Arif Amiri, CEO of the DIFC Authority, said: “Dubai AI Campus helps accelerate the objectives of DIFC’s 2030 Strategy, which aims to further empower our growing fintech and innovation ecosystem.  
“The cluster will also cement DIFC’s position as the largest incubator of the financial sector across the MEASA region as we look forward to collaborating with regional players to help them simplify and expand their business through AI,” he added.

Tech partnerships
The Dubai AI Campus facilitates multinational tech partnerships with leading tech companies such as Amazon Web Services, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Nvidia, who will join the cluster as key partners, further highlighting its empowering nature and making it home to the first innovation lab offering AI solutions to the UAE’s small businesses, in collaboration with du.  
Additionally, the cluster will provide high computing capabilities, including DGX platforms, and state-of-the-art business accelerator programmes that advance implementation of AI applications in the private sector.  

Unique licences
The Dubai AI Campus will be offering a unique AI licence specially designed to meet the requirements of the next generation of AI-dependent businesses. This licence utilises DIFC’s independent legal framework.  
Businesses within the cluster will also benefit from DIFC’s Digital Assets Law, the first of its kind globally, offering legal certainty to investors and users of digital assets.

Future tech showcase
Further testifying to its leadership and focus on leveraging technological advancements for the greater good, Dubai is set to host the premier Dubai AI and Web3 Festival, organised by Dubai AI Campus in collaboration with the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy & Remote Work Applications Office, and DIFC, on 11 and 12 September 2024 at Madinat Jumeirah.  
The event, highlighting Dubai’s unwavering commitment to promote future technology, is expected to attract over 5,000 visitors and participants, besides more than 500 investors and 100 exhibitors.  
Since its launch in 2021, DIFC’s Innovation Hub continues to grow and forge milestone partnerships while driving innovation and helping shape forward-looking plans. It is now home to over 1,000 startups. As part of the Dubai Metaverse Strategy, the Innovation Hub launched the Metaverse Accelerator Program, which enrolled more than 150 students in its first cohort. 

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VAST Data Partners with Google Cloud to Enable Enterprise AI at Scale Across Hybrid Cloud Environments

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Professional headshot of Cem Kul, General Manager of SO/ Ras Al Khaimah resort

VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced an expanded partnership with Google Cloud, the first fully managed service for the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS), enabling customers to deploy the AI OS and extend a unified global namespace across hybrid environments. Powered by the VAST DataSpace, enterprises can seamlessly connect clusters running in Google Cloud and on-premises locations, eliminating complex migrations and making data instantly available wherever AI runs.

Enterprises want to run AI where it performs best, but data rarely lives in one place and migrating can take months and costs millions. Fragmented storage and siloed data pipelines make it hard to feed the AI accelerators with consistent, high-throughput access and every environment change multiplies governance and compliance burdens.

VAST and Google Cloud address this challenge by making data placement a choice rather than a constraint. In this recorded demonstration, VAST showcased the power of the VAST DataSpace to connect clusters across more than 10,000 kilometers, linking one in the United States with another in Japan. This configuration delivered seamless, near real-time access to the same data in both locations while running inference workloads with vLLM, enabling intelligent workload placement so organizations can run AI models on TPUs in the US and GPUs in Japan without duplicating data or managing separate environments.

“Together with Google Cloud, VAST is building a unified data and computing environment that extends to wherever a customer wants to compute and unleashes the potential of AI by unlocking access to all data everywhere,” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder at VAST Data. “Delivered as a managed AI Operating System on Google Cloud, customers can go from zero to production in minutes – we’re turning hybrid complexity into a single, intelligent fabric that provides fast access to data, regardless of where it resides to accelerate time to value for agentic AI.”

“Bringing VAST AI Operating System to Google Cloud Marketplace will help customers quickly deploy, manage, and grow the data solution on Google Cloud’s trusted, global infrastructure,” said Nirav Mehta, Vice President, Compute Platform at Google Cloud. “VAST can now securely scale and support customers on their digital transformation journeys.”

Powering Google Cloud TPUs with seamless data access and near-local performance

Recent performance results also show how the VAST AI Operating System connects seamlessly to Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) virtual machines, integrating directly with Google Cloud’s platform for large-scale AI. In testing with Meta’s Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model, the VAST AI Operating System delivered model load speeds comparable to some of the best options available in the cloud, while maintaining predictable performance during cold starts.

These results confirm that the VAST AI OS is not just a data platform but a performance engine designed to keep accelerators fully utilized and AI pipelines continuously in motion.

“The VAST AI OS is redefining what it means to move fast in AI, delivering model load speeds comparable to cloud-native alternatives while providing the full power of an advanced, enterprise-grade AI platform,” said Subramanian Kartik, Chief Scientist at VAST Data. “This is the kind of acceleration that turns idle accelerators into active intelligence, driving higher efficiency and faster time to insight for every AI workload.”

With VAST on Google Cloud, customers can benefit from:

  • Deploy AI in Minutes, Not Months: Organizations can run production AI workloads on Google Cloud today against existing on-premises datasets without migration planning, transfer delays, or extended compliance cycles. Using VAST DataSpace and intelligent streaming, they can present a consistent global namespace of data across on-prem and Google Cloud instantly.
  • Reduce Data-Movement Costs: Stream only the subsets that models require to avoid full replication and reduce egress – cutting footprint and redirecting budget from data movement to AI innovation with infrastructure that is future-ready for the demanding AI pipelines in genomics, structural biology, and financial services.
  • Maximize Google Cloud Innovation with Flexible Data Placement: Choose what to migrate, replicate, or cache to Google Cloud while keeping one namespace and consistent governance by applying unified access controls, audit, and retention policies everywhere to simplify compliance and reduce operational risk. Leverage VAST DataStore and VAST DataBase to unify prep, training, inference, and analytics without rewiring pipelines.
  • TPU-Ready Data Path: Feed TPU VMs over validated NFS paths with optimized model loading and metadata-aware I/O, delivering fast, consistent warm-start performance and predictable behavior during cold-starts.
  • Build on a Unified Platform: The VAST AI Operating System delivers a DataStore, DataBase, InsightEngine, AgentEngine and DataSpace that scales across on-premises and Google Cloud environments and adapts to changing business needs without architectural rewrites, enabling data scientists to use a variety of access protocols with a single solution.
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AUKEY PARTNERS WITH THE BROOKLYN NETS FOR AN ELECTRIFYING NBA SEASON

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Barclays Center arena interior during Cavaliers vs Nets NBA game with Aukey

AUKEY, a leading innovator in cutting-edge tech accessories, is proud to announce a multiyear partnership with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, beginning this 2025-26 NBA season. This collaboration is AUKEY’s first sports partnership, marking an exciting milestone for their expansion and reflecting their ongoing commitment to delivering high-quality, innovative technology experiences to a global audience.

Through this partnership, AUKEY will team up with the Brooklyn Nets to engage fans both on and off the court. Together, they’ve launched a non-commercial, limited-edition wireless power bank, the MagFusion M 5000 Brooklyn Nets Co-Branded Edition, combining the team’s bold identity with cutting-edge wireless charging technology.

Fans can participate in AUKEY’s social media giveaway activities for a chance to win one on Instagram and Facebook, keeping their energy flowing anytime, anywhere while enjoying exciting game moments.

MagFusion M 5000 Brooklyn Nets Co-Branded Edition

“We’re thrilled to partner with the Brooklyn Nets, a team that embodies creativity, resilience, and the spirit of New York,” said Jackey Li, CEO at AUKEY US. “At AUKEY, we power every moment with strength, endurance, and an unbreakable drive to keep innovating. The Nets share that same unstoppable spirit and we look forward to sharing that spirit of innovation and energy with basketball fans worldwide.”

AUKEY’s work with the Nets will extend in-arena at Barclays Center for the team’s home games, as well as on the team’s social media channels. This partnership represents a fusion of tech, sport, and culture and together, AUKEY and the Brooklyn Nets aim to unlock more power in every moment, from the court to the community, keeping fans charged for what’s next.

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GCC COMPANIES ACHIEVE 30-SECOND PAYROLL PROCESSING WITH 100 PER CENT ACCURACY USING ADVANCED HRMS, REVEALS GREYTHR

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Girish Rowjee, Co-founder and CEO of greytHR

Companies across the GCC region have experienced higher workforce management efficiency using advanced AI-powered HRMS, reporting 100 per cent accuracy and stronger compliance with GCC labour regulations, reveals a recent survey conducted by greytHR, the leading full-suite Human Resource Management System (HRMS) platform. Notably, organisations with around 1000 employees could complete their payroll processing in just about 30 seconds using the innovative platform. 

The findings point to an exponential shift within the GCC HR landscape, where organisations are embracing intelligent automated HR operations amid evolving labour regulations, hybrid work models, and the rise of multi-country workforces. The company’s data shows that 75 per cent of GCC companies are first-time HR automation adopters, while 24 per cent have migrated from legacy systems, highlighting the ongoing regional transition towards fully digitised, compliance-ready HR frameworks.

greytHR is powering this digital shift through its robust cloud-based infrastructure and AI-powered tools, which simplify the entire hire-to-retire employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to core HR, leave, attendance, payroll, performance, exit and engagement.

Girish Rowjee, Co-founder and CEO of greytHR, said, “At greytHR, we believe that ‘people’ are the primary pillar of any business. A company’s growth relies on the dedication and hard work of its employees. As a result of this belief, we built our HRMS to make employee lifecycle management simpler, more transparent, and more connected within the HR ecosystem. Our goal is to help organisations reinvent how they manage and support their workforce through intelligent, people-focused automation in today’s digital world.”

Through it’s a highly intelligent and unified system, greytHR has been continuously addressing the region’s distinctive challenges and maximising impact through efficient workforce management.

Sayeed Anjum, Co-Founder & CTO, greytHR, said: “As companies expand across borders and hybrid work models become the norm, HR leaders face issues such as manual payroll errors, fragmented systems and limited automation, which can directly impact compliance, employee satisfaction, and productivity. Our platform is tailored to address these pain points and the region’s unique needs by serving as an intelligent, unified system that simplifies all stages of workforce management. This further aligns with our broader vision of creating measurable impact for companies and transforming the regional HR ecosystem through digitisation.”

He further stated: “Currently, IT & ITeS, Business, and Financial Service sectors lead in HRMS adoption, at 19 per cent, 15 per cent and 10.5 per cent respectively, highlighting the vital role of technology-driven and service-oriented businesses in catalysing the ongoing digital HR revolution.”

greytHR offers built-in compliance features tailored to GCC nations, including automated GPSSA deductions, multi-country payroll capabilities, and real-time analytics. Moreover, its intuitive interface and modular architecture make it accessible to businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

The company showcased these advanced offerings at the recent HR Summit & Expo 2025, held in Dubai, highlighting its commitment to supporting the region’s evolving workforce needs. As GCC continues to position itself as a global business hub, greytHR remains steadfast in its efforts to positively shape the future of the regional HR industry.

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