News

Saudi Arabia To Transform Downtown Riyadh By 2030

By 2030, the massive development project will add $48 billion to the country’s GDP and generate more than 334,000 jobs.

Published

3 years ago

February 21, 2023

Nour Nasir

saudi arabia to transform downtown riyadh by 2030

Public Investment Fund

Saudi Arabia has announced ambitious plans to transform downtown Riyadh into a major global mega-city. To make the project a reality, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched the New Murabba Development Corporation (NMDC) to aid planning and construction.

The 19 square kilometer site to the northwest of Riyadh will be designed from the outset as a smart and sustainable downtown area, able to hold 20 buildings the size of New York’s trademark Empire State building.

According to the state news agency SPA, the NMDC’s civil engineering project will have over 80 cultural and entertainment venues, a technology and design university, a museum, and an immersive multi-use theater when completed in time for Expo 2030, which Saudi Arabia could potentially host.

Also Read: Hub71 To Invest $2 Billion In New Web3 Startup Ecosystem

The New Murabba project will be centered around sustainability and feature green areas, plus walking and cycling paths to enhance the quality of life and promote healthy, active lifestyles. As well as significantly boosting the well-being of Riyadh citizens, it’s hoped that by 2030, the project will have added $48 billion to the country’s GDP and generated 334,000 jobs.

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.