DUBAI, May 21 (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates

launched a new Arabic language artificial intelligence (AI)

model on Wednesday as the regional race to develop AI

technologies accelerates in the Gulf.

The UAE, a major oil exporter, has been spending billions of

dollars in a push to become a global AI player, looking to

leverage its strong relations with the United States to secure

access to technology.

U.S. President Donald Trump said during a visit last week

that an AI agreement with the UAE creates a path for it to

access some of the advanced AI semiconductors from U.S. firms, a

major win for the Gulf country.

Falcon Arabic, developed by Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology

Research Council (ATRC), aims to capture the full linguistic

diversity of the Arab world through a "high-quality native

(non-translated) Arabic dataset," a statement said.

It also matches the performance of models up to 10 times its

size, it said.

"Today, AI leadership is not about scale for the sake of

scale. It is about making powerful tools useful, usable, and

universal," Faisal Al Bannai, ATRC secretary general said in the

statement.

ATRC also launched Falcon H1, which it said outperforms

competitors from Meta and Alibaba ( BABA ) by reducing the

computing power and technical expertise traditionally required

to run advanced systems.

AI was a central theme during Trump's visit to Saudi

Arabia as well, which is pitching itself as a prospective hub

for AI activity outside the U.S.

The kingdom launched a new company earlier this month to

develop and manage AI technologies and infrastructure, which is

also aiming to offer one of the world's most powerful multimodal

Arabic large language models, according to a statement.