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Dubai Is Set To Become A Metaverse & Blockchain Hub
The city has already established itself as the global capital of Web 3.0, hosting a vast array of metaverse and blockchain technology and startups.
Having already adopted a comprehensive “Metaverse Strategy“, Dubai has made rapid progress as a smart city of the future, using a carefully crafted regulatory framework to attract innovation and talent to its modern, tech-central environment.
Although the metaverse — a blockchain-based virtual world — is still in its early stages of development, it promises to deliver massive potential for millions of users over the coming years, shaking up the entire world’s economy and online culture.
The global market share of the metaverse is thought to have the potential to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030, with tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Nvidia heavily invested in Web 3.0 development. For that reason, the UAE is already aiming to be a market leader, with over 1,000 metaverse-related companies headquartered in the region.
“From retail shopping to healthcare and manufacturing, the metaverse is becoming pervasive in countless industries. It is transforming industries by expediting virtual operations seamlessly and offering business opportunities for investors,” says Pratik Rawal, Managing Partner, Ascent Partners.
Also Read: Everdome Announces First-Ever Metaverse Soundtrack
Dubai’s strategy aims to funnel $4 billion of the UAE’s GDP into related projects over the next five years, bringing an estimated 40,000 virtual jobs to the metaverse by 2030. Augmented reality and blockchain projects currently bring over $500 million to UAE’s economy, with the Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC) accounting for a sizable portion of that figure.
As the metaverse builds into a thriving, heavily populated augmented-reality world, Dubai and the whole of the UAE will be poised to become the epicenter of this advanced technological revolution, bringing all of the benefits of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and augmented reality to the everyday lives of users worldwide.
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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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