Chinese AI giant SenseTime will establish the company’s EMEA R&D Headquarters in Abu Dhabi.
Over the next five years, the company’s AI Centre of Excellence is expected to create hundreds of jobs, most of which will be highly skilled engineers.
SenseTime is said to be the world’s highest valued and fastest growing pure-play AI company. It provides technology to enable autonomous driving, augmented reality, facial recognition, medical image analysis, remote sensing and photo quality enhancement to name a few.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) will provide a support package to aid the establishment of SenseTime’s EMEA R&D operations. The agreement marks a key milestone in the Abu Dhabi Government’s Ghadan 21 Accelerator Programme that is working to support innovation in industry as a means to diversify and build a knowledge-based economy for the Emirate.
Currently, SenseTime operates out of offices in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. The AI Centre of Excellence in Abu Dhabi will be the company’s first presence in the EMEA region. The regional centre will focus on developing AI capabilities across seven different industries including healthcare, remote sensing and education.
SenseTime has a growing roster of more than 700 leading clients including Alibaba Group, China Mobile, Qualcomm and Honda. The new R&D centre, supported by the Abu Dhabi government, will work to develop product solutions for regional clients with local talent.
The establishment of the SenseTime EMEA R&D Headquarters is expected to start in 2019.
