News
Abu Dhabi And NVIDIA Launch First Joint AI And Robotics Lab
Based at the Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute, the project is part of the UAE’s drive to expand its global AI research footprint.
Abu Dhabi has partnered with NVIDIA to launch the Middle East’s first joint research lab dedicated to artificial intelligence and robotics.
Based at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the TII-NVAITC Joint Lab for AI and Robotics will accelerate research into humanoid systems, embodied AI models and autonomous platforms with applications across multiple industries.
The agreement was made official by Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII, and Marc Domenech, regional director for NVIDIA Enterprise in the META region, in the presence of senior officials from the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) and NVIDIA executives Simon See and John Josephakis.
“This collaboration with NVIDIA marks a major step toward building AI-enhanced robotic systems capable of reasoning, adapting, and acting in complex environments,” Aaraj said. “We are accelerating the convergence of perception, control, and language as part of efforts to advance intelligent robotics”.
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The partnership gives TII access to NVIDIA’s edge GPU chips and advanced computing platforms, integrated with TII’s own research in AI, robotics and high-performance computing. The institute will also build on its Falcon family of large language models — the largest developed in the Middle East — to support robotics applications.
NVIDIA executive Carlo Ruiz said the initiative extends the global NVAITC network into robotics for the first time in the region. “By working with TII in Abu Dhabi, we are helping researchers and innovators accelerate breakthroughs that will shape the future of intelligent systems,” he said.
UAE’s AI Ambitions
The launch of the joint lab reinforces the UAE’s national AI strategy, announced in 2017, which aims to embed artificial intelligence across sectors such as healthcare, education and logistics. The UAE wants AI to contribute up to 20 percent of non-oil GDP by 2031, with the domestic market projected to grow from Dh12.7 billion in 2023 to over Dh170 billion by 2030 — a compound annual growth rate of 44 percent.
Supporting this vision, the government has introduced Chief AI Officers across ministries, established AI-focused academic institutions, and run international exchange programs. In June, 50 Emirati AI leaders toured the US to meet with Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft.
The TII-NVIDIA lab adds to a growing list of partnerships designed to strengthen the UAE’s role in AI and robotics, both regionally and globally.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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