Why does a group with roots in Geneva, London, Milan and Singapore choose Abu Dhabi for its headquarters? I was asked that more than once when we consolidated our businesses into Mondevo Group and made ADGM the home of Ittikar. The obviouse answer is the money. Not so.
Yesterday I attended the UAE-UK Business Council's Annual Plenary in London. His Excellency Mansoor Abulhoul, the UAE Ambassador to the United Kingdom, confirmed the commitment of Abu Dhabi's leadership to continue investing in infrastructure, in AI and in its partnership with Britain. Every speech that followed reported on targets already met or exceeded. It was a day about delivery, not just promises, and that is the bet we made when we chose Abu Dhabi.
Capital is available in many places. What is scarce is a jurisdiction that is ahead of everyone else in the two things an AI-native business actually needs: infrastructure and ecosystem.
On infrastructure, two layers matter. The institutional layer, ADGM, runs on English common law with a regulator that engages with new models rather than filing them away. The physical layer is compute, power and data centres at a scale few can match. Stargate UAE's first 200 megawatts are due this year, and MGX is investing across the whole stack, from chips to applications. Ittikar runs a crew of AI agents and holds a sovereign Data Pod for every family. Being close to that capacity, and to the people building it, is a practical advantage, not a slogan.
On ecosystem, Abu Dhabi is not a financial centre with a technology strategy bolted on. Sovereign investors, family offices, MBZUAI researchers, Hub71 founders and a deepening bench of international advisers sit side by side, and the leadership that set AI as a national priority built the institutions to deliver it. That is why it works for entrepreneurial businesses across every industry, not only finance. Whatever you are building, the capital, the talent and the regulator are in the same place and speak the same language.
Ittikar was announced in November last year, was in the hands of its Founding Members by March and opened to new members in September. Could we have done it elsewhere? Perhaps. As fast, with the same access to talent, compute and regulators who understand what we are building? I doubt it.
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