Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy Signs AI Adoption Pact With Alibaba Cloud

The chamber is one of the three chambers under Dubai Chambers. Its vice chairman, Saeed Al Gergawi, signed the agreement with Dr Feifei Li, chief technology officer and head of international business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. The signing took place at the Dubai Business Forum – China, which Dubai Chambers held recently in Shenzhen.

Three Areas of Work

According to the report, the agreement has three parts. The first is skills. Alibaba Cloud will provide training content, certifications, technical workshops and expert-led sessions through Dubai Chambers Academy, along with train-the-trainer programmes and learning resources for company staff.

The second is startups. Selected young companies will get technical mentoring, cloud credits, computing capacity and software licences, and will be connected to Alibaba Cloud's programmes and network.

The third covers businesses that want to test AI and then put it into production. The partners will look at how to support pilot projects and production deployments with technical and implementation expertise. Solutions that prove their value would be listed on Alibaba Cloud's Marketplace, an online store that connects cloud users with independent software vendors. Case studies would measure their business impact.

What the Partners Said

Al Gergawi said international partnerships in agentic AI help Dubai share expertise and gain access to specialist technology and knowledge. He said they would help local companies improve their operations and develop new products and business models.

Eric Wan, general manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Central Asia at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said agentic AI is moving from experiments to everyday business use. He said early adopters will have a big say in how quickly Dubai's digital economy develops. He noted that Alibaba Cloud has served UAE customers since 2016, and said the company would make its technology, training and startup programmes available to the chamber's business community. Al Bayan reported that Alibaba Cloud has opened two data centres to support its services in the region.

Part of a Wider Programme

The agreement falls under the programme Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, launched to move Dubai's private sector towards agentic AI. Dubai Chambers oversees the programme.

The chamber has been building a group of technology partners for the effort. In October it signed memorandums with Nebius Academy and Lovable, according to WAM, and Dubai Chambers has also signed an agentic AI agreement with India's NASSCOM. This week it added an agentic AI category to the Mohammed Bin Rashid Business Award, for companies that can show measurable results from AI agents.

The Alibaba Cloud deal brings in a major Chinese hyperscaler, a sign that Dubai wants to draw on both Chinese and Western providers to scale up AI use in the private sector. The report did not give the financial value of the startup credits or computing resources involved.