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Google Launches Largest AI Initiative In The MENA Region
Introduced in Dubai, the program focuses on AI skill-building, funding, and infrastructure, aiming to unlock $320 billion in growth.
At the AI Connect event in Dubai, which saw participation from Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for AI, as well as other regional leaders and entrepreneurs, Google introduced its AI Opportunity Initiative for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
The program is the most extensive AI endeavor in the region and is aimed at expanding access to essential AI skills, research funding, and AI-driven products.
Google.org, the company’s philanthropic division, will allocate $15 million from this year through to 2027 to regional organizations. The funding is intended to broaden AI’s reach, ensuring it supports diverse communities across MENA and includes resources in skill development, research, infrastructure, and product launches in Arabic:
- AI Skill Development: Google is committed to making AI education inclusive and widely available. New educational programs are being launched, focusing on providing an AI Curriculum in Arabic, along with support for underserved communities. In addition, an AI safety education program for young people (ages 11-14) will be funded via a grant to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- AI Research & Local Solutions: Since 2005, Google has invested over $400 million globally in research. In the MENA region, Google is supporting local institutions through the startup accelerator startAD to develop AI applications supporting healthcare, education, and climate.
- AI-Powered Tools In Arabic: Google’s Gemini, an AI-powered assistant that understands over 16 Arabic dialects, launched in July 2023. New Arabic features include personalized guidance in learning and career advice, plus language-specific conversational and image-generation tools.
- Infrastructure Investment: Google has reasserted its commitment to cloud infrastructure in MENA, with data regions in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait. A partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) will support this effort with an AI hub to expand AI research and to boost digital skills for regional job growth.
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Commenting on the project, Ruth Porat, President of Alphabet and Google, stated, “Google’s long-standing investments in the Middle East and North Africa have helped equip people and organizations with the connectivity, innovation, and skills required to thrive in the global digital economy”.
News
NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
The chipmaker has significantly expanded OpenAI’s latest model across teams from engineering to HR under tight internal controls.
NVIDIA has started rolling out OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model through the Codex coding agent to more than 10,000 employees, extending the tool well beyond software teams and into core business functions.
The deployment covers engineering, product, legal, marketing, finance, sales, HR, operations and developer programs. Staff are using Codex for coding, internal research and routine knowledge work as companies test whether AI agents can move from demos to daily use.
GPT-5.5 is running on NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, linking OpenAI’s newest model directly to the chipmaker’s latest infrastructure push. NVIDIA said the systems cut cost per million tokens by 35 times and raise token output per second per megawatt by 50 times versus earlier generations.
Inside the company, it says the effects are immediate. Debugging work that once took days is being finished in hours and experiments across large codebases that used to stretch over weeks are now handled overnight. Teams are also building features from natural-language prompts with fewer failed runs.
In a company-wide note urging staff to adopt the tool, CEO Jensen Huang wrote: “Let’s jump to lightspeed. Welcome to the age of AI.”
Security remains central to the rollout. Codex can connect through Secure Shell to approved cloud virtual machines, allowing agents to work with company data without moving it outside approved environments. NVIDIA said it assigned cloud VMs to employees so agents run in isolated sandboxes with full audit trails.
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The company added that the setup uses a zero-data-retention policy. Access to production systems is read-only through command-line tools and internal automation layers.
The move also highlights NVIDIA’s long relationship with OpenAI. NVIDIA said the partnership began in 2016, when Huang personally delivered the first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to OpenAI’s San Francisco office.
The two companies have since worked across hardware and model deployment. NVIDIA also said OpenAI plans to deploy more than 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA systems for future AI infrastructure.
For Gulf markets pouring money into sovereign AI and enterprise automation, the signal is clear: internal AI agents are moving from pilot phase to standard tooling.
NVIDIA Puts GPT-5.5 Codex In Hands Of 10,000 Staff
Deezer Says AI Tracks Now Make Up 44% Of Uploads
Yango Ride Introduces In-Chat Trip Planning In ChatGPT
Nano Banana 2 Arrives In MENA For Google Gemini Users
