News

MENA Digital Economy Set To Hit $400 Billion By 2030

Education and health technology sectors alone are forecast to reach a combined market size of $20 billion by 2030.

Published

3 years ago

October 6, 2022

mena digital economy set to hit $400 billion by 2030

Although COVID-19 sent shockwaves through brick-and-mortar retail businesses and decimated the travel industry, the world’s digital economy actually reaped enormous benefits from lockdowns and reduced movement.

According to newly released data, the digital economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries are now estimated to be worth an incredible $400 billion by 2030.

To reach the enormous milestone in under ten years, the entire region’s economy will need to undergo rapid transformation. Sectors including food, travel and bill payment have declined in recent years. However, health and education technology appear to be booming — though predictably, online retail is driving much of the growth, increasing at a rate of 20% per year alone.

According to the report, Generation Z will fuel a great deal of the decade’s growth, and the expansion of EdTech services will require significant skill development, with schools and higher education institutions adding new technology-focused courses to their curriculums.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia To Send First Female Astronaut Into Space By 2023

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already significantly contributed to the region’s global digital expansion. Future growth is anticipated to be more evenly spread among the MENA countries, as the two leading nations currently account for half of the area’s total digital economy.

According to the new survey, the rest of the MENA region is improving in its rate of digital adoption, with the time spent on digital channels now nearing 8 hours per day, which is a figure similar to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

News

Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users

The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

Nour Nasir

Google

Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.

Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.

Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.

Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.

Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide

To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.

While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.

Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.