Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (DUBAI)
With the UAE's AI industry in full swing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest provider of cloud services in the world, is vying to increase its presence in the UAE amidst a burgeoning AI industry in the country. On Wednesday, the company made its pitch to hundreds of software engineers, executives, and tech business leaders at the Dubai World Trade Centre, hoping to establish itself as the partner of choice for the AI companies of the future.
"We keep investing in talent. This is the future of this generation, this is the future of this region," stated Yasser Hassan, Managing Director of AWS Middle East.
"We want to see more talent, more partnerships like the one with TII."
Hassan was referring to the organisation's partnership with the Abu Dhabi-based Technological Innovation Institute, which utilised AWS servers to launch its acclaimed "Falcon" language models.
Speaking as a special guest, the institute's Chief Scientific AI Advisor, Professor Merouane Debbah, explained the importance of computing power and data storage for running highly exhaustive AI models.
"The Falcon 1 had 180 billion parameters and was trained on basically 4000 A100 GPUs, which is quite huge... and now we are engaging in extreme scale. The type of problems that we're building are beyond the 100,000 petaflops (floating point operations per second) per day," Professor Debbah explained.
"To do that, we realised quite rapidly that we cannot do it on our own. We need to build a community that embraces Falcon and starts working with us so we can support them, and supporting the community translates into providing them with the environment to work in, and that environment is computing."
AWS currently has several partners and customers in the country, including FAB, Careem, and several government agencies. However, it is hoping to get ahead of competitors like Microsoft Azure and Equinix by innovating in the fields of energy efficiency and computing capacity.
Data centres have been highly criticised for their enormous energy consumption, particularly as the world attempts to decarbonise. Estimates from the International Energy Agency suggest data centres and transmission consume almost 1-1.5% of energy per year. This problem is only compounded in the UAE, where high temperatures mean year-round air conditioning is required-a looming problem for the country, which has quickly surged as the biggest data hub in the region and is heavily invested in the proliferation of AI.
Pitching to crowds on Wednesday, AWS Global VP Kevin Miller made the company's net-zero by 2050 goal a theme of his speech. Miller revealed the company had invested heavily in the development of new silicon technologies and chips, which he claimed would radically reduce energy consumption and increase the computing power of data centres.
