Emirates NBD becomes first MENA bank to harness OpenAI’s sovereign AI infrastructure for customers in the UAE

Dubai, UAE – Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye and South Asia (MENATSA) region, and OpenAI announced a new enterprise collaboration that will make Emirates NBD the first bank in the MENA region to deploy OpenAI's GPT models using in-country in-ference infrastructure in the UAE. Banks operate in one of the world's most highly regulated industries, where security, governance and com-pliance are non-negotiable. Access to in-country inference allows financial institutions to adopt frontier AI at enterprise scale while supporting local regulatory expectations around data residency, privacy and opera-tional resilience. This announcement represents an important milestone in advancing sovereign AI capabili-ties for financial services in the UAE.