UAE eyes national LLMs to secure AI sovereignty and Arabic fluency

This FTI Consulting piece is one of the clearest articulations of why mid‑sized, high‑income states are serious about building national LLMs rather than just renting GPT or Gemini. For the UAE, the argument blends classic industrial policy—AI as an engine of diversification—with digital sovereignty and cultural‑linguistic concerns around Arabic dialects that global models still handle poorly. Jais is held up as proof that a regionally tuned Arabic–English model can anchor a wider ecosystem of startups and public‑sector applications.([consultancy-me.com](https://www.consultancy-me.com/news/12262/building-a-national-large-language-model-opportunities-and-challenges))

In the race to AGI, the proliferation of national models changes the competitive landscape in subtle ways. It fragments the model layer—more bespoke systems with local guardrails—but also deepens the talent and compute pool outside the traditional US‑China duopoly. If countries like the UAE can marshal enough high‑quality data, GPU capacity and expert teams, they could end up running sovereign models fine‑tuned on top of global foundations, with local retrieval or RAG layers for sensitive domains. That hybrid pattern doesn’t slow AGI so much as diversify who controls near‑AGI capabilities. It may also push frontier labs to take multilingual, culturally sensitive performance more seriously to remain competitive against well‑funded national stacks.