The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) was launched in 2019 in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, and describes itself as the world’s first graduate-level, research-based university devoted entirely to artificial intelligence. It is named after Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, signalling that AI was being treated as a national strategic priority rather than just an academic discipline.
The university offers master’s and doctoral programmes in fields such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing, and recruits faculty and students internationally. It sits at the centre of the UAE’s broader push to position the country as an AI hub, a push that also includes the appointment of the world’s first government minister for AI and heavy state investment in compute and chips.
MBZUAI is a concrete example of how Gulf states have tried to convert oil wealth into a knowledge economy by building research institutions from scratch. For a business reader it shows that the geography of AI talent is no longer confined to the United States and China, and that well-funded newcomers can stand up serious research capacity in only a few years.