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Abu Dhabi-Developed AI Arabic Language Model Unveiled

The open-source bilingual model is called Jais and is more accurate than existing Arabic implementations, developers say.

Published

3 years ago

August 30, 2023

Nour Nasir

abu dhabi-developed ai arabic language model unveiled

A new AI Arabic language model has been unveiled by Abu Dhabi-based Inception, a subsidiary of G42. The project aims to bring one of the world’s most widely used languages into the AI mainstream.

Jais — named after Jebel Jais, the highest mountain peak in the UAE — was developed for government use and financial, energy, climate, and healthcare applications. The open-source bilingual Arabic-English model was built with additional input from the Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Cerebras Systems, based in Silicon Valley.

Jais developers claim the new AI language model is more accurate than previous Arabic LLMs. The software also represents a further step towards encouraging scientific and computing communities to work in languages other than English.

“We see Jais becoming very useful in generative use cases, such as generating responses to questions, generating documents, translations, emails, and even providing advice and recommendations,” said Andrew Jackson, CEO of Inception.

As well as understanding context and cultural references, Jais can also capture linguistic nuances across various Arabic dialects, “making it more accurate and contextually relevant than other models,” the developers said.

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Jais was trained using Condor Galaxy, the “world’s largest AI supercomputer”, launched by parent company G42 and Cerebras in July. The software is continuously expanding as more Arabic content is curated, according to the companies involved.

WorldData ranks Arabic as one of the world’s most widespread languages, with over 400 million speakers. It is the official language of 22 countries and is partly spoken in 11 more. However, despite a dramatic rise in Arabic content, the language still only represents around 1% of the online space, according to data presented by G42 and Cerberus.

Jais software is available to download on the machine learning platform Hugging Face.

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Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict

Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.

Published

4 days ago

September 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

Microsoft

Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.

“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.

The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.

The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.

Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.

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The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.

So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.