Gulf Business Machines (GBM) has launched the UAE’s first AI Lab, built on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. The facility enables GCC organisations to move AI from experimentation to production securely, addressing sovereign AI requirements such as data residency and regulatory compliance while cutting deployment times significantly.
The AI Lab helps organizations to compress their deployment timelines from months to weeks. Customers can test secure, on-premises and hybrid AI use cases while addressing critical sovereign AI requirements such as data residency, regulatory compliance, security, and low-latency processing.
Cisco’s pre-validated, modular AI infrastructure with NVIDIA is engineered to unify high-performance computing and networking, with security built into every layer, spanning models, agents, workloads, and data paths. The platform features NVIDIA AI Enterprise software together with continuous, real-time monitoring of AI workloads and agent activities, with security policies enforced in depth at the hardware level.
Pieter Bil, CEO at GBM, said, “As regional enterprises transition from AI experimentation to full-scale operationalization, they face a critical decision-making window. Building production-grade AI requires a delicate balance between rapid innovation and strict data governance. We have bridged this gap by turning world-class technology frameworks into secure, locally managed platforms tailored for the GCC.”
“The next era of AI growth in the Gulf will be defined by those organizations that are able to move their AI visions to commercial reality quickly and effectively, with sovereign control and resilience,” added Cassie Roach, VP of Global Partner Sales, AI Infrastructure & Connectivity at Cisco. “Our collaboration with GBM and NVIDIA is about more than deploying infrastructure, it is about helping accelerate the Gulf’s ambition to lead the global AI economy on its own terms.”
Dirk Barfuss, Director EMEA Channel at NVIDIA, added, “Enterprise AI is shifting to inference-optimized and agentic infrastructure to power next-generation applications. NVIDIA accelerated computing, together with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, provides the performance and scale these workloads demand. With the launch of their AI Lab, GBM now has the perfect showcase to demonstrate to organizations across the GCC how they can help deploy that infrastructure securely and at scale.”
