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Digital Tech Will Help Saudi Arabia Host 30 Million Pilgrims By 2030
For the last two decades, the Hajj pilgrimage has been typically attended by 2 to 3 millions of pilgrims.
This year’s Hajj pilgrimage was open to 1 million pilgrims from Saudi Arabia. By 2030, Saudi Arabia would like to host as many as 30 million pilgrims. To make this ambitious goal possible, the Kingdom is betting on digital technology.
One tech initiative that was launched by the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah earlier this year is Hajj Smart ID, a smart ID card with barcodes containing pilgrim’s personal information and documentation. The card frees pilgrims from having to carry official documents, and it also helps guide pilgrims to their residences, among other things.
Last year, Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and Doyof Al Rahman Program (DARP) launched the Pilgrim’s Smart Bracelet (NUSK) project. The bracelet is intended to help organizers track pilgrim’s health information and vaccination records.
Tech initiatives like Hajj Smart ID and the smart bracelet project are guided by the Pilgrim Experience Program, a core component of Saudi Vision 2030. The program strives to give as many Muslims as possible the opportunity to perform Hajj and Umrah to the fullest extent while working on enhancing their experience.
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“These technological solutions can help attract more Muslims to the two holy mosques, ultimately achieving the Kingdom’s goals in the Saudi Vision 2030 to welcome millions of pilgrims and help them with high-quality services and enrich their experience in the kingdom,” said Amr Al-Madah, Deputy Minister of Hajj and Umrah.
For the last two decades, the Hajj pilgrimage has been typically attended by 2 to 3 millions of pilgrims. The last three years were exceptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the year 2020 seeing a record low attendance of just 1,000 pilgrims. It will be interesting to see how this new digital technology will be able to effectively handle almost 30x the amount of pilgrims by the end of the decade.
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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
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