Oman crept into the Middle East AI competition with a grand gesture: Egypt‘s Prime Group and Oman’s Afouq Developments have signed up to create Oman’s first Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technologies Zone in Muscat—an initiative to turn the Sultanate into a startup destination, investor magnet, and research collaboration center.
Revealed in the busy edges of the COMEX International Exhibition in Muscat, the project is being co-developed with Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications, and Information Technology and promoted as a flagship to build a regional—or possibly global—technology hub. The organizers claim the zone will not only be bringing in technology but also combining leading-edge solutions with Omani ideas of culture, building a “future-ready” campus that also respects local culture.
Siham Al-Harthi, Afouq Developments chairman, positioned the land in a way that is greater than property: it’s an ecosystem. The development, the release added, will introduce cutting-edge global technology and infrastructure that is precisely designed for seed-stage businesses, incubators, and accelerators—with compute infrastructure, co-working labs, and regulation-approved test areas.
Prime Group CEO Mahmoud Farrag mentioned the company’s global experience and promised to tap into a pre-existing network of corporations, research centers, and accelerators to fill the zone with brains and capital. The transaction is a cross-border tech diplomacy: Egyptian expertise and regional Omani ambition converging to pursue investment and talent streams in the Gulf and North Africa.
The announcement is complemented by a wider regional AI push:Egypt just launched a 2025–2030 National AI Strategy and will also stage the region’s first-ever Middle East & Africa AI World Exhibition and Summit in February 2026—an already-gaining-attention global organizer and intended bringer of policymakers, startups, and enterprise vendors together under one roof. That timing makes the Muscat zone a likely project showcase and regional AI collaborator.
So why does such an event make a difference beyond ceremonies and press conferences? Because small, well-designed tech enclaves can potentially speed up talent pipelines, seed local AI health, logistics, and port products, and redirect where regional innovation occurs. Oman’s gesture—merging cultural identity with high-performance computing and international partnership—is likely to be a model of how Gulf states construct competitive advantage in an artificial intelligence world.
If the Muscat zone delivers on its potential, expect new companies, cross-border R&D initiatives, and maybe even a new era of Middle East–Africa tech convergence—all unfolding from a declaration made in the midst of COMEX fervor.
