Dubai Chambers moves the Dubai Business Forum to Shenzhen, expanding commercial AI and autonomous vehicles to drive partnership with China
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Dubai Chambers is preparing to move the Dubai Business Forum to the Chinese city of Shenzhen on October 14, in a step that aims to cement the emirate's position as an operational and investment base for Chinese companies seeking to expand into Middle Eastern markets. The forum's fifth edition internationally and second in China will focus on moving beyond traditional trade to build deep technology and industrial partnerships, prioritising large-scale commercial deployment of artificial intelligence, autonomous mobility technologies, digital infrastructure, advanced industries and fintech.
The shift toward Shenzhen, China's capital of tech industries, launches with a broad executive participation that includes companies such as Baidu, Huawei Cloud and Tencent Cloud, alongside electric-vehicle giant BYD and the autonomous-mobility firm Arridge, formerly known as Xpeng E-HVT. Representatives from major investment entities such as CICC and China Merchants Capital, as well as leaders in global logistics and supply-chain services like DB World China, Emirates SkyCargo, iMail and YTO International, will also take part in the forum sessions.
Moving from exploratory trials to commercially scalable deployment with measurable financial return will constitute the core focus of the upcoming discussions.Mohammed Ali Rashid Loutah, director general of Dubai Chambers, affirmed that the partnership between the two sides is evolving at an accelerating pace to go beyond traditional trade relations and to establish a broad platform for joint investment and innovation. The working sessions will explore providing capital to support technology projects, alongside examining regulatory frameworks and field-testing mechanisms for products in real-world environments, with participation from senior officials and business leaders including Engineer Sultan bin Sa‘id Al-Mansoori, chairman of Dubai Chambers, Hussein bin Ibrahim Al-Hamadi, UAE ambassador to China, and Hadi Badri, CEO of Dubai Economic Development Corporation.
The influx of Chinese cloud-infrastructure specialists opens new options for development and digital-transformation teams in the region.We see a direct impact on the tech work environment in the Gulf and Egypt, as bringing Chinese computing providers closer to regional markets helps lower the cost of hosting models and processing large data sets, offering technical and commercial alternatives that compete with Western cloud platforms. This equation compels system engineers and transformation leaders to move toward diversifying infrastructure, acquiring operational competencies in managing multi-cloud environments and aligning with Chinese software and hardware, while logistics partnerships give e-commerce firms and startups immediate technical linkage to Asian supply chains.
The Shenzhen stop follows Dubai Chambers' international presence, which has previously organised forum events in London, Hamburg and New York, as well as the first China stop hosted by the capital Beijing in August 2024 with participation exceeding eight hundred business leaders. The current shift highlights a practical focus on building joint testbeds for AI and autonomous-mobility systems, enabling investors to trial models and services in the field and expand into regional markets from a business environment that balances innovation requirements with regulatory controls.