Banks spent years piloting AI without forcing it into day-to-day operations. New research across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East shows why that era ended — and why revenue now depends on accountability, not ambition.

Spending on data centres and servers is set to rise sharply next year as cloud providers and governments expand capacity for artificial intelligence, while growth in devices and enterprise software slows.

Riverbed’s Global Survey: The Future of IT Operations in the AI Era finds strong AIOps returns in financial services, but limited enterprise-wide AI deployment.

Governments are increasingly backing local AI platforms over global models as geopolitical pressure, regulation, and trust concerns reshape how artificial intelligence is built and controlled.

The new proof-of-concept will test aerial robotics for routine and on-demand perimeter patrols around nationally strategic assets, with a focus on robustness, reliability and security.

Informatica’s “CDO Insights 2026: Data governance and the trust paradox of data and AI literacy take center stage” report, produced with Deloitte and based on a Wakefield Research survey of 600 senior data leaders at organisations with $500m+ in revenue, shows AI moving from pilot to daily operations even as reliability and governance gaps persist.

The UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has released K2 Think V2, a 70-billion-parameter reasoning system designed to give the country full control over its AI data, training, and evaluation pipeline.

In Dubai, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami outlined how AI, infrastructure risk, and sovereignty are reshaping enterprise technology decisions.

A new partnership between Inception and Visa explores agent-driven commerce inside regulated payment networks, raising questions about trust, control, and accountability.

Dubai-based legal tech startup Qadi has partnered with Core42, a G42 company, to run its regulatory compliance platform on sovereign cloud infrastructure, keeping data, AI training, and compute fully within UAE jurisdiction.

The new centre expands Abu Dhabi’s role in global technology governance, focusing on AI, cryptography, and autonomous systems as regulation struggles to keep pace.

Launched at Davos, a new whitepaper argues that regulation must become more adaptive, using AI and data, with Presight contributing to the design of the framework.

The new centre will advance research, policy and deployment across quantum computing, robotics, space technologies and related AI applications.

The partnership embeds OpenAI’s latest models inside the software that runs daily operations at large companies, signalling a shift from AI experiments to infrastructure.

Announced at Davos, the partnership reflects a broader strategy to position Abu Dhabi as a global hub for applied AI systems that can operate at national and enterprise scale.

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.

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.

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.

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.