Dubai AI Festival: Scale AI Opens in UAE, New AI Sandbox

The third Dubai AI Festival was held in downtown Dubai in the last week of October 2026. Fortune reports more than 20,000 participants from 100 countries, 500 investors and 200 exhibitors, including more than 100 Chinese technology companies. Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum toured the pavilions on opening day and raised the targets for the Dubai AI Campus to more than 1,000 specialized AI companies and over 5,000 highly skilled jobs by 2030.

The biggest corporate news was Scale AI. According to Unite.AI, the company formally launched its UAE entity on October 26, 2026, based at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). Scale says it builds evaluations and benchmarks for frontier AI labs and will apply the same approach to UAE institutions: define what a system must reliably do, test it before and after launch, build in human oversight, and train local teams to run the systems. Scale also signed a memorandum of understanding with Presight on October 8 at AI Everything in Abu Dhabi, covering agentic AI for government and enterprise and continuous evaluation of AI agents in live operations. An MoU is an intention to explore, not a delivered product.

A separate announcement targets the regulation problem. On October 28, the Dubai Future Foundation launched an AI Sandbox through Sandbox Dubai, working with government bodies including the Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence. It is open to startups, SMEs and established firms building AI products in areas such as education, healthcare, transport, logistics, tourism, media and government services. Products must be at minimum viable product stage or beyond and ready for commercialization. Participants get regulatory guidance and, depending on the case and subject to approval by the relevant authorities, possible regulatory exemptions, while regulators gather evidence on where rules need updating.

The campus numbers give some scale. Fortune says the Dubai AI Campus, launched in May 2024, now has more than 500 AI companies, over AED 1 billion (about $272 million) in private equity and venture capital investment, and more than 2,000 specialized technology jobs. The Sandbox announcement cites a Microsoft report ranking the UAE first globally for AI use among its working-age population, at 73.3% compared with 18.8% globally. These are figures from the sources named below, and we have not verified them independently.

What this means for businesses: the Gulf is building the testing, evaluation and regulatory layers around AI, not only the data centers. If you sell or build AI products for UAE customers, check whether the sandbox fits your product stage and sector. If you buy AI, the Scale approach is a useful checklist wherever you operate: define what the system must do, test it before and after launch, keep human review in place and train your own staff. Treat partnership announcements as signals, and look for live deployments before planning around them.