Ai Everything Abu Dhabi to spotlight global AI innovation

Abu Dhabi is accelerating its role as a global force in applied AI, mega-scale compute infrastructure, and real-world deployment, as the UAE capital gets set to host the world’s largest AI-first Expo and Summit, featuring the largest gathering of global AI unicorns, from 6-7 October 2026 at ADNEC Centre.

Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026 arrives as shifting global dynamics compel businesses and governments worldwide to forge ahead with AI spend commitments, pouring nearly US$ 2.59 trillion into the transformative technology this year, a 47% jump from 2025 (Gartner).

The sold-out Expo and Summit shall articulate ‘The New Intelligence Order from Abu Dhabi, The AI Capital of the World’. It shows the world how that translates into tangible business returns and economic value through evidence-based AI research, new models and live industry use-cases.

Organised by inD, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi convenes over 400 AI infrastructure builders, model makers, unicorns and startups, and 200-plus investors with US$ 91 billion assets under management, alongside governments, academia, and tech executives from 60 countries. Over 180 speakers lead the Summit lineup, headlined by Arthur Mensch, Co-Founder & CEO of Mistral AI, now valued at over €21 billion, and Marc Raibert, Founder of Boston Dynamics, will appear together in the UAE for the first time to discuss the future of sovereign AI, new alliances, and industrial intelligence.

World’s first AI-native government takes centre-stage

More than 50 UAE government entities are participating, spearheaded by the Department of Government Enablement, Abu Dhabi (DGE) as Host Partner, representing the largest showcase of public sector AI use-cases. At the Summit, H.E. Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab, Chairman of DGE, and H.E. Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at DGE, will bring Abu Dhabi’s model of AI-native government into sharp focus on the global stage.

DGE is steering Abu Dhabi Government’s transformation into the world’s first AI-native government by 2027. The department integrates more than 40 government entities into a single AI-driven ecosystem, with over 100 AI use-cases already live across the emirate’s public services. A US$ 3.54 billion investment programme underpins Abu Dhabi’s wider push towards AI-led public services, economic value creation and responsible deployment.

Commenting on the ambitious AI transformation plan and the event, H.E. Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital, DGE, said: “Abu Dhabi will become the world’s first AI-native government next year, and the evidence is already clear in the way we’re redefining public services for millions of people and businesses. We have built the blueprint, and Ai Everything Abu Dhabi is our invitation to the world to examine it, to see what intelligent governance looks like at scale, and the enormous benefits it delivers to people’s lives today.”

Trillion-dollar global infrastructure leaders power AI’s economic impact
As companies double down on AI spending, the pressure to deliver measurable returns is mounting. Ai Everything Abu Dhabi puts that proof to the test with the widest showcase of live AI use-cases and applications across public services, banking, healthcare, energy and education.

Solutions+, a Mubadala company and the show’s Global Partner, is powering smarter organisations by combining AI, digital innovation and human expertise to transform how businesses operate.

“At Solutions+, we help bridge national ambition with operational delivery by bringing together sovereign infrastructure, enterprise platforms, trusted partners, and the expertise required to embed AI into real services and workflows. As Global Partner of Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026, we look forward to demonstrating how agentic AI, strengthened by human judgement and accountability, can improve services, raise productivity, and create measurable value. This is how we turn AI into more than a technology investment – a driver of sustainable growth and national progress,” shared Nasir Al Nabhani, Managing Director, Solutions+.

Delivering that impact at national scale takes a full stack: compute, platforms, agents and governance working together as one system. G42 calls this the Intelligence Grid, its model for building AI-native societies.

“An AI-native society takes shape when intelligence becomes something people can depend on: getting care, running a business, accessing a public service. The real measure of progress is how widely that possibility becomes everyday reality. That is the ambition behind G42’s contribution to AI Native Societies, connecting the infrastructure, capabilities and partnerships needed to make AI useful at the scale of a society,” said Faheem Ahamed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, G42. “At Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, ‘The World of AI’ brings us and our partners together around that work. From our home in Abu Dhabi, we want to help close the distance between what AI can do and what people actually gain from it.”

Leading Abu Dhabi entities join them in advancing the AI-native agenda and building the sovereign stack, including the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), TII, Ministry of Investment, UAE Cybersecurity Council, UAE ICP, Abu Dhabi Ports, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Hub71, Awqaf Abu Dhabi, Public Prosecution, Alef Education, Higher Colleges of Technology, Khalifa Fund, Khalifa University Enterprise Company and Q Mobility.

International AI titans including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, ASUS, Cerebras, Cloudflare, Coursera, Dell, HPE, IFS, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nokia, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, Seagate, and Snowflake dominate an international exhibitor list spanning chips, cloud compute and enterprise software, together representing over US$10 trillion in collective market capitalisation.

Trixie LohMirmand, CEO of Ai Everything

Trixie LohMirmand, CEO of Ai Everything, said: “Beyond the speculative sheen of AI, its true impact lies in transforming science, services and society. Abu Dhabi is moving decisively into that territory, with the leadership assembling the infrastructure, institutions, research capabilities and global partnerships needed to turn AI ambition into national capacity. The response from the international AI community for Ai Everything Abu Dhabi has been emphatic. The world’s leading enterprises are coming to Abu Dhabi to engage a market investing, deploying and setting a benchmark in new intelligence.”

UAE’s sovereign AI research and deployment come to the forefront

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, has built its Falcon family of large language models on the principle that capability comes from how a model is built, not how large it is. Falcon-H1 Arabic, trained on high-quality Arabic data with a purpose-built architecture, now leads the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard.

This approach lowers the barrier to entry: organisations without the infrastructure that very large models demand can still deploy AI. At the show, TII will present 23 demonstrations drawn from nine research centres, weighted towards sectors where the UAE has real depth, energy, materials, marine and maritime infrastructure, aerospace and autonomous systems. Among them is GeoAI, a machine-learning model of the subsurface geology of the northern UAE, built to support national mineral exploration.

The world’s largest gathering of AI unicorns

More AI unicorns will take the stage in Abu Dhabi than at any other AI event this year, another marker of Abu Dhabi leading the race to build the world’s intelligent future.

Mistral, Europe’s AI leader participating at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi for the first time, will address the question of who controls AI as it takes on more autonomy. The French decacorn recently closed a record €3 billion (US$ 3.49 billion) Series D funding, Europe’s largest ever single funding round, valuing it at more than €21 billion (US$ 24.42 billion).

Mohamed Zouari, Managing Director MEA, Mistral

Mohamed Zouari, Mistral’s Managing Director MEA, shared, “We believe that control is becoming the defining topic in AI adoption. This is what we are building with Abu Dhabi’s most innovative organisations and what we will demonstrate at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi.”

ElevenLabs, the AI company behind the industry’s leading voice and audio models, will showcase two innovations: ElevenAgents, a platform for building human-level conversational experiences into products and services, and ElevenCreative, which pairs its audio models with image and video generation tools. ElevenLabs serves enterprises and governments across 80 countries.

Across the Summit and sector-focused conferences, more than 180 global AI experts and business leaders spar on the debates now testing the AI economy, from trusted deployment and autonomous systems to agentic AI at scale and the contest over computing power, infrastructure and control. Certified trainings and workshops extend that conversation into hands-on learnings, spanning multi-agent workflows, rapid prototyping, model development and emerging AI tools.

Together, the programme traces AI from policy and principle to the harder task now confronting governments and industry: turning new intelligence into secure, responsible, and scalable progress, with Abu Dhabi increasingly serving as a live reference point for this shift.