Nevada-based AI infrastructure unicorn Positron AI has opened its first office outside of the United States at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). The move signals the start of a major regional expansion for the company, which builds specialized hardware for AI inference and is positioned as a direct competitor to industry giant Nvidia.
Quick Facts
- First international office established in Dubai’s DIFC.
- Raised over $300 million with a $1B+ valuation.
- Backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, QIA.
A Strategic MENA Expansion
Positron AI’s entry into the region is a calculated move, first signaled at Web Summit Qatar in February this year. The company’s focus on MENA follows its $230 million Series B funding round, which included a strategic investment from the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).
To lead its regional push, Positron appointed Husni Khuffash as Managing Director for MENA in December. Khuffash, who has previous experience at Aixplain, EY, and Microsoft, is tasked with driving the company’s business and engaging with enterprise, financial services, and government clients across the region.
Husni Khuffash stated that the company is pleased to move to DIFC, describing it as a dynamic hub that reflects its commitment to innovation. “Our focus on power-efficient, deployable inference solutions will help strengthen the wider ecosystem as demand for scalable AI capabilities accelerates,” he noted.
Challenging the GPU Status Quo
As global computing demand shifts from training AI models to running them at scale (a process known as inference), Positron is building hardware to address the high power consumption, memory constraints, and rising costs of traditional GPU-based systems.
The company’s current product, the Atlas server, is engineered to run AI models with up to 500 billion parameters at performance levels comparable to Nvidia’s DGX-H100 systems, but with lower power needs and costs. Jump Trading, an investor who was first a customer, reported experiencing roughly three times lower latency than Nvidia H100 systems on certain inference workloads.
Positron’s next-generation product, Titan, is planned for 2027. Built around its Asimov chip, the company claims it will offer five times better energy efficiency and six times more memory capacity than Nvidia’s upcoming Rubin GPU, directly addressing the reality that modern AI workloads are increasingly limited by memory bandwidth, not just raw computing power.
Plugging into Dubai’s AI Ambitions
Positron’s arrival aligns with DIFC’s ambition to transform into the world’s first “AI-native” financial center. The company has set up its base within the DIFC’s AI Campus ecosystem, a key part of a strategy that forecasts $3.5 billion in economic value and 25,000 new jobs.
Mohammad Alblooshi, CEO of the DIFC Innovation Hub, welcomed the move. “Positron AI brings a compelling approach to AI inference infrastructure that supports the next phase of growth in Dubai’s technology and innovation landscape,” he said. Alblooshi added that the company’s foundation aligns with DIFC’s evolution and goal to set a “global benchmark for AI governance and responsible innovation.”
About Positron AI
Positron AI is a US-based AI infrastructure company building specialized hardware for AI inference. The company designs systems focused on delivering lower costs, higher memory density, and improved energy efficiency compared to conventional GPU-based alternatives for deploying large language models.
Source: Middle East AI News and IndexBox
