As digital banking growth accelerates across the GCC, Stitch says institutions in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are still constrained by layered legacy stacks and dependency on third parties for product updates.

Forecast upgrades are being powered by data centres, chips, and cheap-ish money. Inside companies, AI is still failing to turn into measurable profit for most executives.

As customer acquisition costs rise and funding tightens, a new class of regionally rooted D2C brands is quietly outperforming global-first plays by building cultural fit, local trust, and cleaner unit economics before scale.

New Adobe research shows Middle Eastern enterprises have largely solved for cloud and AI adoption. The harder problem is turning that infrastructure into integrated execution and measurable business impact.

The Riyadh startup says today’s produce supply chains reward volume over quality. Its new $5m seed round will test whether farmers and consumers can both win from a demand-driven model.

Cloudflare is bringing the creators of the Astro web framework into the company, backing the open-source project to accelerate development and help brands and publishers build faster, content-driven websites that perform better in search and for users.

The internet infrastructure company says the deal will help creators control, price, and sell content to AI developers, as pressure mounts over how models source data.

Infoblox has signed a definitive agreement to buy Axur, adding automated external threat discovery and takedowns as attackers use AI to scale phishing, impersonation and fraud. The deal is expected to close in Spring 2026, subject to approvals.

Lean Technologies and Ziina have launched the UAE’s first live, customer-initiated Open Finance payment under the Central Bank’s Open Finance framework — enabling instant account-to-account bank payments inside the Ziina app via regulated APIs.

Governata says the funding will accelerate product development and regional expansion as Saudi organisations prepare their data foundations for large-scale AI adoption.

Behind stainless steel walls in Muscat, KitchenomiKs is rejecting cloud kitchen hype in favour of data, discipline, and infrastructure — and betting that food delivery’s future will look more like manufacturing than marketing.

As AI demand surges, technology companies are signing nuclear and energy deals that expose a deeper truth: growth now depends on infrastructure, politics, and who controls electricity.

Data centres are becoming a major new electricity load as AI scales, forcing governments and utilities to rethink grid investment, efficiency standards and the pace of renewable build-out.

The tech industry talks constantly about women, diversity, and inclusion. Yet leadership and influence remain concentrated. A new global survey shows how perception gaps, not talent gaps, keep the system intact.

Global semiconductor revenue climbed 21% to $793.4 billion in 2025, as the AI infrastructure boom pushed Nvidia past $100 billion in chip sales and turned high-bandwidth memory into the market’s new battleground, according to preliminary figures from Gartner released on January 12, 2026.

From the US to Europe and the Gulf, AI investment is surging, but questions remain about monetisation, risk and who ultimately bears the cost.

The first funding rounds of 2026 reveal three different venture markets — each shaped by what investors believe they can afford to lose.

Microsoft Report Shows 64% of the UAE Uses AI, Representing the World’s Most Advanced AI Adoption System

As AI platforms reshape how content is consumed and monetised, Cloudflare is making a counter-move  - embedding consent, security, and creator protection into the Internet’s infrastructure rather than the platform layer.

From platform roll-ups to data-security deals, cybersecurity is becoming enterprise infrastructure. Funding is concentrating, disciplines are collapsing into control planes, and AI is forcing boards to treat security as a prerequisite, not an afterthought.