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Riyadh Air And Huawei Partnership To Shape Future Of Air Travel
Saudi Arabia’s new national carrier is leaning on the Chinese tech giant’s cloud and consumer reach to shape its digital strategy.
Riyadh Air has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Huawei as it lays down the digital foundations of its operations ahead of launch, putting technology at the center of the carrier’s expansion plans.
The agreement outlines a phased collaboration across cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, loyalty platforms and mobility services. While long-term in scope, the initial push has already been outlined: China, alongside a small set of priority international markets where Riyadh Air is seeking early scale.
The MoU formalizes work already taking shape between the two companies around smart aviation and digital systems. For Riyadh Air, the goal is to operate as a digital-first airline from day one, rather than layering technology onto legacy processes later. Huawei will support the carrier’s broader digital build-out, drawing on its experience in cloud, AI and consumer-facing ecosystems.
China sits at the core of the strategy: Around 20% of smartphone users in the country use Huawei devices, giving Riyadh Air access to a tightly controlled digital environment shaped by local platforms and habits. The airline plans to tailor market-specific journeys covering ticket selection, booking and in-trip engagement.
“[The] China market is an important part of Riyadh Air’s global expansion and essential to Saudi Arabia’s tourism growth,” said Vincent Coste, chief commercial officer of Riyadh Air. “As the Kingdom raises its target to 150 million tourists by 2030 our partnership with Huawei strengthens our ability to deliver the digital, seamless and personalized journey Chinese guests travelers expect”.
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Coste said the airline aims to act as a bridge between Saudi Arabia and China, and Huawei’s consumer footprint — more than 730 million monthly active users worldwide — is expected to help introduce travelers to the new carrier’s digital lifestyle ecosystem, Sfeer.
Riyadh Air plans to serve more than 100 destinations by 2030. As competition among Gulf carriers tightens, the airline is betting that a tightly integrated digital technology stack, built early and tuned to outbound markets like China, can set it apart.
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.
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