Building with purpose: Five imperatives for shaping the cities of the future in the GCC

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, March 2026

by Marwan Bejjani, Elias Karam, Jean Aboueid, and Saad Iskandarani



Saudi Arabia’s giga developments, the repurposing of Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure, and other ambitious projects show that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have embarked on unprecedented visions of urban development. They are investing US$1 trillion to bring these visions to fruition. The returns they reap, however, will be determined not just by the magnitude of investment or dramatic new skylines, but by the long-term resilience and prosperity of the region’s cities. To meet the urban challenge, the GCC’s construction sector and government decision-makers need to consider five interrelated tensions. Each tension puts a different kind of pressure on cities. Read the rest here.

Meeting the compute imperative in the Gulf countries

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&, January 2026

By Hani Zein, Fawaz Bou Alwan, Ali Ghaddar, and Mahsa Ettefagh

The Gulf’s AI journey is entering a transformative phase. AI is shifting from experimentation to scale, agentic systems are proliferating, and Gulf nations are building AI ecosystems featuring homegrown champions and local models, such as KSA’s Allam, UAE’s Falcon, and Qatar’s Fanar. This phase of AI development requires a critical enabler: sovereign compute processing power at scale. Now, Gulf nations must assess their future compute needs and act decisively to secure compute capacity.

AI is poised to become part of daily life in the Gulf. In healthcare for example, AI agents will review patient test results, suggest diagnoses, generate treatment plans, and manage patient journeys based on individual needs – updating records, scheduling follow-ups, and coordinating medication orders.

AI models are the heart of this transformation – and sustaining them requires vast processing power. The greatest demand for compute power will come from running models for real-time, low-latency inference. Compute will also be needed to build and train local models, and to fine-tune global models for regional and sector-specific applications.

To forecast how much compute power Gulf nations will require in the near term, we analyzed the volume of data that AI models will process — measured in model tokens, or small fragments of text, images, or other inputs – across training, fine-tuning and inference. We then translated this demand into the processing required (FLOPS, or floating-point operations per second) and the hardware needed to deliver it through GPUs. Our analysis reveals that the region will need 400,000 – 500,000 GPUs by 2028. Read the rest here.