(MENAFN- Mid-East Info) Dubai, UAE – October 2025 – Panellists at the Annual Meetings of the Global Future Councils and Cybersecurity 2025, taking place on 14-16 October in Dubai, explored how we can build AI infrastructure that scales innovation and shrinks environmental impact.

The event is organised by the UAE Government in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), bringing together more than 700 experts and specialists from 93 countries in 37 Councils.

Moderated by Azeem Azhar, Chief Executive Officer of Exponential View, the session – titled 'AI's Scaling Dilemma' – brought together Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation; Janet Godsell, Dean of the Loughborough Business School at Loughborough University; Kate Kallot, Founder and CEO of Amini; Cina Lawson, Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation of Togo; and Ali Sajwani, Managing Director of Operations Finance and Hospitality at DAMAC Group, and Founder and CEO of Amali Properties.

Khalfan Belhoul looked back at when the Dubai Future Foundation was first announced, recalling that“the message from leadership was you have to be the lab for Dubai.”

“You need to have a perfect blend between the government and the private sector,” he noted.“Nowadays, the private sector probably owns power and data than any government. It is inevitable that we create that perfect marriage, while at the same time, creating an agile environment where innovation can thrive. And I believe you can actually see our leaders looking at the country as an entrepreneurial journey and with a venture capital mindset.”

“Governments need to play a key role in addressing challenges,” Belhoul added.“In the UAE, we have a Chief AI Officer across all government entities. The UAE has actually had a Minister of AI since 2017. Those officers go through certain training, and they are also encouraged to train their people who later do the same and so on. And of course, we run various programmes to ensure the private sector also benefits from this expertise.”

Minister Cina Lawson spoke of the strategic approach used in Togo and that can be applied to small countries.“Our strategy is really regional cooperation,” she said.“If you look at Africa as a whole, only four or five countries can afford to build national capabilities. The others need to partner. We need to partner in terms of data centres, as well as energy and electricity, the legal framework, and talent, for which we need to build a lot more capacity.”

“Our Ministry has built a team, a data lab, in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley,” Lawson added.“It is a group of data scientists that support all other ministries in designing better policies using AI. We have made progress, notably in supporting sustainable farming or forestry using satellite imagery. We also have made quite a fair amount of investment in solar energy, and for the first time in our history, the continent is really looking into nuclear. we are moving in a direction that combines sustainability with development.”

Also in a small country context, Kate Kallot said:“In the markets we operate, we have a lot of constraints; energy and connectivity are not a given. So how do we make sure that we innovate within those constraints and actually use them as superpower? This brings us to the idea of building smaller models that are more efficient, more optimised for specific use cases.”

“We did not start by building data centres,” she noted.“We started by working with countries to understand what data they have and in what format to determine the minimum viable compute infrastructure they need to be able to process that data. And that brought us to really think about data centres in a different way. We realised that we could build containerised data centres that support that minimum viable compute that governments need to address needs related to data sovereignty and residency without actually having to overspend on their investments.”

For his part, Ali Sajwani spoke of the situation on the other end of the spectrum, building on DAMAC's experience in building large data centres.“Our background is real estate. We only entered this business in 2021,” he said.“The reality is you need to look for land that has sufficient electric power available. Our clients are the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, etc.; they come to us with their designs and blueprints, then you start by building a very basic structure.”

“If you have land with power that will be available in a few years, they don't really give you that much attention,” Sajwani continued.“A big problem we will face in a few years is going to be the amount of power needed to power all these data centres. I think the only way we will have some major breakthrough when it comes to energy usage is going to be nuclear, considering the needs that AI has put on the entire power grid.”

Janet Godsell agreed:“I think we know we are going to need more energy. The UK and other countries are committed to try to do that by using sustainable energy, and one of the ways that we can support growth in the shorter term is to reduce the load. We must consider if we need less data going through the pipe, so that we can compute less but also store less.

“We have a centre within Loughborough University that looks at data decarbonisation,” she added.“What we need to do, particularly within industrial organisations, is to actually look at the data that we've got and determine the 'dark data', which refers the data we have that we don't use. Some figures suggest that we don't use around 65% of the data that we hold. Going forward, we can make sure we optimise storage by being able getting rid of data when we don't need it. In that way, we can actually reduce our consumption of in the first place.”

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