News

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.

Published

4 years ago

July 15, 2022

digital tech will help saudi arabia host 30 million pilgrims by 2030

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.

Also Read: Cisco Unveils Strategic Vision For Enterprise Cloud Security In MENA

“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.

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.

Published

2 days ago

January 15, 2026

Nour Nasir

uae-built falcon-h1 arabic leads llm benchmarks

Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation Institute

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.

Also Read: Governata Raises $4M For Saudi AI Data-Governance Push

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.