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Savvy Games And AWS Partner To Grow Saudi Gaming Sector
Amazon Web Services will provide support through two programs: AWS Skill Builder and AWS Activate.
Savvy Games Group has signed a collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the development of Saudi Arabia’s gaming industry. The partnership is designed to strengthen local games technology infrastructure while empowering startups, studios, and developers across the Kingdom.
AWS will bring two of its global programs to Saudi Arabia. AWS Skill Builder provides digital courses and learning paths to help developers and professionals gain cloud and AI expertise — skills increasingly in demand across the gaming sector. Meanwhile, AWS Activate gives eligible startups access to resources, credits, and exclusive offers to help them scale their businesses and bring new titles to market.
Beyond training and startup support, Savvy and AWS will work together on wider industry initiatives, focusing on enablement and networking to build a stronger domestic ecosystem.
“We are delighted to enter into this partnership with AWS, and look forward to working together to further grow and empower Saudi Arabia’s fast-growing ecosystem of game developers, technical experts, and creative minds. I am sure that the aspiring talent we have in the Kingdom will make the most of these opportunities that our collaboration will bring about,” said Brian Ward, Chief Executive Officer at Savvy Games Group.
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Nina Walsh, Global Leader for Industry Business Development at AWS, added: “At AWS, we are committed to empowering the next generation of game developers with the tools, training, and cloud technology they need to innovate and scale globally. Through our collaboration with Savvy, we aim to help unlock the creative potential of Saudi Arabia’s gaming community, accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge technologies like generative AI, and enable local talent to bring their visions to life for players around the world”.
The partnership aligns with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the National Gaming and Esports Strategy, which aim to position the Kingdom as a regional hub for gaming and esports. As the agreement takes shape, Savvy will support AWS events in the country and assist local developers and companies in applying for these programs.
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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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