Dubai, UAE — Imagine a pie called Technology Hub where everyone in the GCC region wants a piece of it. Instead of fighting over it, Gulf leaders recognized that the real challenge lay in dividing it into parts proportionate to the goals and intentions behind utilizing them, satisfying unique demands, and growing hunger for digital transformation. And that’s how the GCC configured their competitive battle for tech hub supremacy, designed with delicate diplomacy.
The market is ripe for growth in this field. The GCC smart cities and digital transformation market reached $145.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $907 billion by 2032, growing 25 percent annually, according to estimations by MarketResearch.
Setting the demarcation lines
The GCC is developing four different distinctive hubs where a different vision of development is at play.
Abu Dhabi appears focused on pushing AI and finance, while directing sovereign capital and cluster-building toward large-scale AI infrastructure such as data centers and sovereign AI labs, and industrial and selective finance initiatives led by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and its financial regulator, the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), as well as state-backed investment vehicles ADQ, and Mubadala. According to US management consulting firm OliverWyman, Abu Dhabi’s Digital Strategy 2025–2027 allocates $3.53 billion to develop local infrastructure and capabilities.
“The startups joining Cohort 17 reflect the ambition and caliber of founders we are welcoming into our community. Backed by strong funding and building technologies with broad market applications, they are pursuing growth globally,” Ahmad Ali Alwan, CEO of Hub71, said in September 2025.
Doha’s digital bet
Doha, meanwhile, shows a strong focus on fintech, sportech, and investing heavily in national AI capacity and regional partnerships. AI and Hyper-Automation are arguably Qatar’s most significant and overarching technological priorities, aiming to become a regional leader in the field.
The country is also deploying 5G networks using high-speed, hyper-connected infrastructure. Doha is making its mark by building a regional hub for data centers and cloud services, supported by strong cybersecurity firms.
“By combining legal certainty with progressive innovation, Qatar is not only attracting global capital but also building the infrastructure to sustain it,” a Qatar Financial Centre (QFC) Community Newsletter said in May 2025.
Riyadh’s sovereign scale
Riyadh is directing efforts focused on logistics, digital commerce, and AI, but is also centrally driven by large sovereign-led industrial projects such as Neom-style ecosystems and PIF-backed AI company HUMAIN, toward efficiently connecting logistics, energytech, and digital services.
PIF told Reuters in 2025 that it is embedding AI throughout valuation and portfolio processes and is committing larger annual deployment levels to strategic tech and industrial projects.
Dubai’s competitive edge
Last but not least, Dubai’s status as a leading global tech hub is driven by strategic initiatives under the Dubai Economic Agenda D33 and the Dubai Future Foundation (DFF). It is focused on fintech, Web3.0, robotics and automation, and consumer tech, smart city infrastructure, and digital services, but it’s also increasingly competing with ADGM on regulated finance and with Riyadh on scale.
“Sovereignty and self-sustainability and domestic customization of technology to local needs are all very, very important. And also difficult to achieve if you solely rely on importing and external technical transfer”, Eric Xing, President of MBZUAI, posted on Instagram in December 2025.
Growth projections to 2030
Strengths across the Gulf are obvious in 2025: enormous sovereign capital, coordinated national strategies, and rapid infrastructure deployment, from data centers to cloud partnerships, and investor-friendly zones.
Quoting Global SWF, Deloitte revealed that the GCC SWFs collectively manage almost $6 trillion in assets under management (AUM), more than 40 percent of the global total.
Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, for instance, was the largest sovereign-owned investor globally in 2024, deploying $29 billion across 52 deals, a 67 percent increase from the previous year.
Big Tech anchors
Bloomberg and the Financial Times (FT) reported in 2025 that Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are moving quickly to underwrite infrastructure and anchor strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Nvidia, and major cloud providers.
Microsoft has already announced it will invest $15.2 billion in the UAE between 2023 and 2029, including a $1.5 billion equity investment in technology group G42.
More than $10 billion in capital expenses towards advanced AI and cloud infrastructure. The company has a growing team in the UAE, including almost 1,000+ full-time employees and related staff, supported by an Emirati partner ecosystem that has grown to reach 1,400+ firms employing over 45,000 professionals across the country.
“AI’s role in a knowledge economy is to transform how knowledge is created, analyzed, and applied. It compresses months of research into days, surfaces insights at scale, and turns data into action. But its real impact comes when humans interpret, validate, and contextualize those insights. In that sense, AI enhances expertise, allowing organizations to move from fragmented experimentation to insight-driven innovation that makes an impact,” Rabih El Chaar, Managing Partner and founder of Smarkk, a boutique management consultancy supporting organizations in the GCC, told TRENDS.
The company announced that licenses granted in September 2025 allow it to deliver over 60,000 Nvidia chips, including the top-of-the-line GB300 Grace Blackwell models, to power data centers in the Middle East.
It is worth noting that regional Venture Capital (VC) depth lags the U.S. and China and with it the risks being over-reliance on sovereign capital rather than organic startup-led scaling, and slow commercialization of startup ideas and products.
Even with top VC intervention, it is hard to scale innovation-driven enterprises. “International benchmarks show that in well-functioning ecosystems, roughly 20–25 percent of seed-funded startups progress to Series A, and more than half of those advance to Series B. Ultimately, only 10–13 percent of the original seed cohort reaches Series B or beyond, a pattern that reflects healthy attrition, balancing exploration with disciplined investment,” Dr. Soumaya Askri, Assistant Professor, School of Management, Canadian University Dubai, wrote in a recent Op-Ed.
But, if capital continues and the region deepens tech talent and VC capacity, regional tech hubs could see high single- to low double-digit CAGR in tech value-add segments through 2030, including cloud and AI services, fintech, logistics tech, and digital commerce, according to projections by BCG and McKinsey trend assessments and FT/Bloomberg coverage of 2025 capital flows. Across the board, 2025 SWF messaging is consistent: multi-year capital deployment (through 2030), focus on AI and digital infrastructure, and a willingness to co-invest with global tech firms to secure talent and supplies.
(This article was originally published in the February 2026 print issue of TRENDS)
