Scale AI Formally Launches UAE Entity at Dubai AI Festival

Scale AI formally launched its UAE entity on October 26, 2026, announcing the move at the Dubai AI Festival and basing the new operation at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).

In Scale’s announcement, the company said the launch, together with a memorandum of understanding it signed with applied AI company Presight earlier in October 2026, marks a new phase of its work in the country.

Scale said it works with the world’s leading frontier AI labs and develops evaluations and benchmarks that help the industry measure how advanced models perform, and that it will bring the same rigor to its work with UAE institutions: systems that operate reliably in Arabic, meet local governance requirements and keep people in control. The company said establishing the DIFC entity gives its presence a permanent footing and supports its commitment to work alongside UAE institutions, partners and talent for years to come.

Evaluation, Governance and Skills

The company described three elements of that approach in practice. The first is evaluation: determining what a system must reliably do, then testing it against that standard before launch and after. The second is governance: building oversight into a system from the start, including human review where decisions require it. The third is skills: training local teams to operate, evaluate and improve the systems themselves, so the capability stays in the country.

Scale pointed to its record elsewhere in the region, saying it has trained or upskilled nearly 6,000 people in Qatar and that applications it built there are in everyday use by the public. The company also said it views sovereignty as control and choice over data, deployment, models and governance, including the freedom to adapt or change systems as needs evolve.

The Presight Memorandum

The memorandum of understanding with Presight was signed on October 8, 2026, during the AI Everything event in Abu Dhabi, by Dr. Adel Al Sharji, chief operating officer of Presight, and Jules de Boinville, head of EMEA at Scale AI. “The next phase of AI adoption will be defined by how reliably AI systems perform when deployed in critical real-world environments,” de Boinville said in Presight’s announcement of the agreement.

The agreement set out plans to explore a strategic collaboration to build agentic AI applications, strengthen the performance, reliability and governance of AI deployed in complex, mission-critical environments, and accelerate responsible AI adoption across the region. Under it, the companies said they will explore jointly designing, building and refining AI solutions for government and enterprise customers in the UAE and other mutually agreed markets, with successful outputs potentially becoming repeatable offerings for government entities in the UAE and across the region.

The companies said they intend to pair agent development with evaluation frameworks that continuously assess the accuracy, reliability and performance of AI agents once they are running in live operational environments. They also said they will explore end-to-end agentic resilience solutions across critical sectors such as water, power, healthcare and transportation, and will examine how simulation can model complex operational and emergency scenarios, test decision-making processes before real-world deployment and strengthen preparedness across critical systems. According to the announcement, evaluation guides how each agent is designed and deployed, defining what it must accomplish, which errors are unacceptable and where human authority must be retained, then verifying that performance holds once the system is running.

Al Sharji said AI’s true value will be measured by the outcomes it enables when embedded into the real-world systems that underpin modern nations, describing Presight as the UAE’s sovereign intelligence architect focused on embedding intelligence into critical infrastructure in ways that strengthen human decision-making, preserve operational control and deliver measurable outcomes at scale.

DIFC’s AI Campus and the National AI Framework

The Dubai AI Campus at DIFC, which Scale cited in its announcement, was inaugurated on May 18, 2024, by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, as part of phase one of the Dubai Universal Blueprint for Artificial Intelligence, a program launched to accelerate AI adoption across all relevant sectors. In DIFC’s release on the inauguration, the centre said phase one was complete with more than 75 businesses registered on a 10,000-square-foot campus, and that phase two will extend over 100,000 square feet and is set to attract over 500 companies, creating more than 3,000 jobs by 2028.

DIFC describes the campus, first announced in 2023, as the largest dedicated cluster of AI and advanced technology in the MENA region. The centre said the campus offers a dedicated AI licence built on DIFC’s independent legal framework, and that it facilitates tech partnerships with companies including Amazon Web Services, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and Nvidia.

At the national level, the UAE Cabinet adopted the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031 on April 21, 2019, aiming to position the country as a global leader in AI by 2031. The strategy’s eight objectives include reaffirming the UAE’s position as a global AI hub, attracting and training talent for the jobs of the future, providing a data-driven infrastructure to support AI experiments and optimizing AI governance and regulations. Implementation is overseen by the Emirates Council for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transactions in coordination with local and federal entities, and the first phase of implementation prioritizes resources and energy, logistics and transportation, tourism and hospitality, healthcare and cyber security.

The UAE Charter for the Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence sets objectives that include ensuring AI is used in an ethical and responsible manner, protecting privacy and data security, and enhancing transparency and accountability in its use. Its stated principles cover safety, algorithmic bias, data privacy, transparency, human oversight, and governance and accountability, and the charter describes human judgment and human oversight over AI as irreplaceable.