Scale AI opens a UAE office at the Dubai AI Campus located in DIFC

Scale AI has opened a UAE office at the Dubai AI Campus in DIFC. The company formally launched its UAE entity on 26 October 2026 during the Dubai AI Festival, naming DIFC as its local home. The launch follows a memorandum of understanding signed with Presight on 8 October 2026 to explore AI applications for UAE government and enterprise customers. The MoU covers assessment of AI systems, oversight practices, emergency response preparation and scenario exercises, with potential uses named in water, power, health care and transportation. Scale AI said establishing the entity at DIFC puts its presence on a permanent footing and supports work with institutions, partners and local talent. Trevor Thompson, Scale AI’s global managing director, described the DIFC location as a long-term commitment. The announcement was made at a signing ceremony during the festival, which ran 26–27 October at Dubai World Trade Center. Scale AI, founded in 2016 and valued at $29 billion, works with frontier AI labs on evaluations and benchmarks and provides data labelling and training services. The company said its work in the UAE will focus on systems that operate reliably in Arabic, meet local governance requirements and retain human oversight where decisions require it. It also plans to train local teams to operate, evaluate and improve those systems. In Qatar, Scale AI has trained or upskilled nearly 6,000 people, according to the company. The company has more than 1,000 employees globally. The company has not published the number of staff now based in the UAE office or the size of the space it has taken at the Dubai AI Campus. Those details would show the scale of the local operation. Reports citing LinkedIn data put Scale AI’s total Gulf headcount above 130, with more than 30 people working in the UAE. The company opened its first regional operations in Qatar in early 2025 and added an office in Riyadh later the same year. The UAE entity was registered at DIFC in June under the name Scale AI ME Limited, according to one report. For UAE institutions the practical change is a local entity that can support evaluation, governance and skills work. The value depends on whether the exploratory MoU with Presight leads to signed deployments and whether the DIFC base is used for customer-facing work rather than only registration. Neither Scale AI nor Presight has published a contract value, a named customer or a delivery timetable for the collaboration. The Dubai AI Campus was inaugurated in 2024 as part of the Dubai Universal Blueprint for Artificial Intelligence and offers a dedicated AI license. Other AI companies have also established entities at DIFC’s Dubai AI Campus. Scale AI’s move pairs a formal UAE entity with an earlier MoU. The company has not published how its local offering differs from the services it already provides from its US headquarters or from its Qatar and Saudi operations. DIFC has said the campus is designed to bring together infrastructure, business support and international connections for AI companies building in Dubai. Sheikh Hamdan has approved a target for the campus to attract more than 1,000 AI companies by 2030. The announcement does not list the legal name of the UAE entity in the company’s own release, its registration number or the number of people hired locally since the entity was formed. Those details would show the operational footprint beyond the festival announcement. Without them the opening remains a description of a DIFC base rather than a measured expansion of local capacity. Scale AI has said it will help UAE institutions keep control as they turn ambitions into dependable services. If Scale AI publishes the number of local staff, the first signed customer contracts under the Presight MoU and the share of work delivered from the DIFC office, the launch has a measurable follow-through. If the next update is only a restatement of the entity opening, the change for the market remains the same as the initial announcement. The figures missing are local headcount and signed contracts.