Nokia is launching an Open Innovation lab in Dubai, UAE, with a focus on accelerating adoption of technologies including AI and machine learning for network automation and optimisation.

Lebanon has reportedly received a multimillion-dollar donation from China to install solar energy for the country’s internet provider, according to Lebanon’s ministry of telecommunications.

The role of telecommunications in managing traffic, supporting the cars of the future and, potentially, helping the environment has been underlined by a smart parking initiative on the way in Qatar and an electric vehicle (EV) services agreement in Malaysia.

Today’s second story from Bahrain takes us from the sky to the sea with the news that telecommunications solutions provider Batelco has selected SubCom, which engineers, manufactures, and installs subsea fibre optic data cables, to build and install a regional subsea cable.

Two recent agreements, in Bahrain and India, underline the growing importance of the space sector in areas like IoT and the cloud.

US cloud giants Oracle announced Beyon-owned operator Batelco chose the vendor to upgrade its core IT platforms, in a move to enhance new services and respond to changing market dynamics.

The growth in the use of 5G for industry-specific networks continues with news that operator Orange Jordan has established the first private 5G network in Jordan for Aqaba Container Terminal (ACT).

Provider of water and process technology solutions Aquatech Systems, headquartered in India, and Saudi Arabia-based data centre developer and operator DataVolt have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for water cooling and recycling technology cooperation and services.

King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) Development & Management Company and Orange Business, the enterprise division of Orange, have signed a deal through which Orange Business will supply a smart city platform for KAFD.

Huawei opened a cloud data centre in Saudi Arabia’s capital city Riyadh, a move to grow its cloud services in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa.

Inception, the artificial intelligence (AI) applied research unit of UAE technology group G42, has announced the open-source release of Jais, described as the world’s highest-quality Arabic large language model (LLM). Jais is a 13-billion parameter model trained on a newly developed 395-billion-token Arabic and English dataset.

Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (du) has announced that it is joining forces with services platform GoDaddy.

Bahrain’s Minister of Industry and Commerce, Abdullah bin Adel Fakhro, has announced the launch of iFactories, described as a national initiative to support the movement of the country’s industrial sector towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution (sometimes called Industry 4.0).

Analyst company Canalys reported smartphone shipments in the Middle East saw 2% year-on-year growth in Q2, against the backdrop of overall shipments declining globally by 10%.

Turkcell Group, owner of the leading mobile operator in Turkey, has announced plans to invest around US$240 million in green energy projects.

Omani data centre provider Datamount announced plans to launch a data centre in the Muscat Governorate.

Saudi Arabian service provider Zain and Red Sea Global (RSG), a multi-project developer, have unveiled what they call the world's first zero-carbon 5G network at the Six Senses Southern Dunes resort at The Red Sea Project on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.

Salam has selected Oracle to drive 5G innovation across the Middle East.

Orange Jordan has selected Ericsson to enhance its core network infrastructure by implementing Ericsson’s cloud-native dual-mode 5G Core and 5G Charging solutions.