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Abu Dhabi Merger Will Create A $4.1B Space Company
Bayanat, a geospatial data provider, and Al Yah Satellite Communications will become Space42, the MENA region’s first AI-powered space-tech company.
Two Abu Dhabi companies have agreed to merge in a landmark deal that will create “Space42,” one of the world’s most valuable listed space-tech companies.
Bayanat, a geospatial data provider, and Al Yah Satellite Communications — known as Yahsat — will have a market capitalization of $4.08 billion.
“This merger will unite two leading home-grown companies to create the Mena region’s first AI-powered space technology company,” explained Tareq Al Hosani, chairman of Bayanat.
“Together, we will leverage our key synergies to reinforce our position as a key engine of growth and strategic solutions provider to the UAE government and its agencies while expanding our reach to global customers,” he added.
The proposed merger will be realized through a share swap, with Bayanat remaining a legal entity. The shareholders of Bayanat and Yahsat will own 54% and 46%, respectively, of the newly created company.
“The merger is a compelling opportunity to amplify value creation for shareholders, utilizing synergies and strategic consolidation to create a technologically advanced champion […] The enlarged entity will benefit from accelerated growth potential as a player of scale with enhanced competitive advantage,” said Musabbeh Al Kaabi, chairman of Yahsat.
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The space sector is currently enjoying a massive surge of interest as competition hots up with more companies entering the arena. According to figures from the Space Foundation, the space economy grew by 8% to nearly $550 billion in 2022 and is projected to expand by at least another 40% over the next five years.
The UAE, currently the Arab world’s second-largest economy, has the region’s largest space sector in terms of investment size. Last year, the Emirates launched an $820 million fund to support its latest space program and a new initiative to develop high-tech radar satellites.
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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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