Abu Dhabi, Dec 22 (PTI) Abu Dhabi’s tech accelerator Hub71 has embarked on a drive to strengthen its role as a hub connecting Asia, the Middle East, and the West, according to a top official of the government-backed
startup platform.
Peter Abou Hachem, Head of Growth and Strategy at Hub71 tech ecosystem, said the objective is to cement Abu Dhabi as a top global tech hub by building one of the fastest-growing tech ecosystems in the world.
“Our existence is all about supporting Abu Dhabi to diversify the economy from an oil-heavy GDP, and one of the initiatives under that big vision is to build Abu Dhabi into a global tech ecosystem,” Hachem said during an interaction with visiting Indian media recently.
“Hub71 exists for the mandate to build a global tech ecosystem from Abu Dhabi,” he said. Since its launch in 2019, Hub71 has grown into a thriving community of startups spanning more than 20 sectors.
The development during the first five years happened roughly in three phases, he said.
“Phase one was to prove that we can actually bring startups in. Phase two was to actually start building the ecosystem, because we were meant to build an ecosystem, not just bring startups in. Phase three is all about focus, which was in the last two years,” he said.
“We have a critical mass of startups across 20 sectors. We have a critical mass of partners,” he said.
“We have 200 plus partners now across different verticals,” he added. “We have more than 15 different partnerships with countries around the world. We want to double down on these partnerships,” he said.
Hub71 has strong ties and collaborations with Telangana’s innovation scene through Hyderabad’s T-Hub incubator, with both supporting startups, talent, and cross-border growth.
“How do we attract companies from all over India, but also support our companies expand into India, would be one of the few strategies that we’ll have next as well,” Hachem said.
“We have become the capital for the Global South because of the central location,” he said. Hachem also spoke about the massive 5 GW Artificial Intelligence (AI) campus/data centre cluster being developed by UAE AI company G42 in partnership with US hyperscalers and tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
“We believe that the 5 GW factory will have a lot of opportunities across the value chain, not just for AI companies, (but also) for climate tech companies, because you need a lot of energy for this, for logistics companies for maintenance software, for anything related to building data centres,” he said.
WeWork is Hub71’s real estate partner, Hachem said. “They manage the real estate offices and the community on the ground because we do not want to focus on real estate. We’re ecosystem builders,” he added.
“Just like everything else, if you’re not fast enough to move with the technology, you will be left behind, so AI-enabled people will reach much more advanced places than non-AI-enabled people,” he said.
“We’ve started seeing AI companies creating audits for AI software, so AI auditing AI, which becomes kind of a matrix-like situation. It is fun to see where the world is headed,” Hachem said. PTI VT DR DR
