French Mistral, US Accenture & Salesforce... AI Companies Flocking to Middle East

Middle East AI Market Shows Rapid Growth

AI Investment Expanding for Industrial Structure Reform

Mistral Launches Arabic-based AI

Accenture Opens Data Center in Saudi Arabia

Naver Also Developing Arabic LLM

Global artificial intelligence (AI) companies are rushing to enter the Middle East market. This is because Middle Eastern countries, traditionally centered on oil economies, are expanding AI investments to restructure their industries.

French AI developer MistralAI launched 'Mistral Saba', an Arabic-based AI model, on the 17th. Mistral Saba is an AI model specialized in Arabic. According to MistralAI's internal testing, the response reliability in Arabic conversations is 92%, significantly outperforming English at 78%.

MistralAI intentionally reduced the number of model parameters to just 24 billion. This is only 3.5% of DeepSeek R1's 670 billion parameters. This means it doesn't require massive GPU operations for AI processing. The goal is to expand AI applications through lightweight implementation.

Behind MistralAI's Middle East expansion lies the concept of Sovereign AI. As the AI market restructures around the US and China, there's growing demand for developing AI systems adapted to national languages. Global Big Tech's AI solutions cannot accurately reflect the context and characteristics specific to each language.

Global IT consulting firm Accenture has entered the Saudi Arabian AI market in partnership with Google Cloud. Strategy consulting firm KPMG is building a large data center in collaboration with local Saudi IT company Edarat. Salesforce is investing $500 million (approximately 665 billion won) in Saudi Arabia for AI talent development and infrastructure expansion. They also plan to launch 'Hyperforce' cloud services in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Among Korean companies, Naver has been developing Arabic Large Language Models (LLM) in partnership with the Saudi government since last year. On the 13th, Naver signed an MOU with Korean AI semiconductor startup Rebellions for 'Saudi Sovereign AI Development'.

Middle Eastern countries are rapidly adopting AI to restructure their fossil fuel-dependent industrial structure. The UAE launched the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Committee (AIATC) last year, aiming to reduce public institution spending by half by 2031 through AI adoption. Saudi Arabia has established the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and is expanding AI investments through its sovereign wealth fund.

The Middle East AI market is growing rapidly. According to research firm Statista, the Middle East AI market size was $7.56 billion last year. It is expected to increase by 32.2% to $10.01 billion this year. The market size is projected to exceed $27.5 billion by 2029. An IT industry insider stated, "The Middle East has the most capital to invest in AI globally," adding that "as the Middle East emerges as an AI hub connecting Asia and Europe, Big Tech companies are accelerating their market entry."

Reporter Oh Hyun-woo ohw@hankyung.com