Abu Dhabi's AI company count grew 67% in a year

Abu Dhabi's population of artificial intelligence firms grew 67% during 2025 to reach 700 companies, and the emirate launched a $500m AI fund in 2026 dedicated to SMEs and early-stage companies. The fund is the more revealing of the two figures, because of the layer it addresses. Abu Dhabi's AI programme has been weighted toward the largest possible commitments. MGX , launched by Mubadala and G42, is working toward $100bn for AI infrastructure and applications. Stargate UAE is a gigawatt-scale compute project. These are national-champion scale interventions. Capital at that altitude is not the instrument for a fifteen-person company building a vertical AI product. It funds data centres, chips and the balance sheets of entities large enough to absorb it. A $500m vehicle aimed at SMEs and early-stage companies completes the stack — infrastructure at the top, and now growth capital sized for the 700 firms expected to build on it. Between the two sits Presight–Shorooq Fund I, a $100m global fund launched in September 2025 by G42 with Shorooq Partners. Its stated focus is sovereign AI cloud, agentic reasoning, physical AI and sector-specific AI in industries including finance and construction. The thesis is coherent with the infrastructure bet rather than separate from it. Sovereign AI cloud needs somewhere to run; physical AI needs compute; agentic systems need inference capacity. A fund investing in the software that consumes the compute the same group is building is a vertically integrated position, and how independently it invests is not visible from outside. The number that will test the whole programme is demand. The UAE AI market is currently valued at around $578m and projected to exceed $4.2bn by 2033, implying roughly 22% compound annual growth. That projection is modest against the infrastructure being built. A $100bn infrastructure programme serving a domestic market forecast to reach $4.2bn implies most of the demand coming from outside the UAE. Which is a coherent strategy — export compute, host other people's models, become the region's AI utility, and earn on power, cooling and operations. It is a different business from a domestic AI economy, and the 700 companies are the part that builds the second one alongside it.