#AI Development PC

[budgetgameruae]

Best Graphics Card for AI Development at Budget Gamer UAE

Choose a powerful GPU like the RTX 4090 or RTX 3090 if you're looking for the best graphics card for AI development, whether it's neural networks, computer vision, or data science. Combine it with a strong ecosystem that includes a CPU, RAM, storage, cooling system, and power source. Additionally, Budget Gamer UAE, your local expert in high-end AI development PCs, offers the greatest service, pricing, and performance.

[shadow-redferne]

sooo fucking tired of people saying to "use nightshade/glaze to protect your art!", my pc cant fucking run them and for all i know techbros can just figure out a way to bypass it anyway.

[z2z-gaming-and-random-art-ai]

Back Cover to AI Art S3E53 - GT Legends

Older video games were notorious for back cover descriptions that have nothing to do with the game so let's see what a text-to-image generator makes of these descriptions. each episode of Back Cover to AI Art Season 3 will feature 4 ai art creations for each game.

1. Intro - 00:00 2. Back Cover and Text Description - 00:10 3. Creation 1 - 00:30 4. Creation 2 - 01:00 5. Creation 3 - 01:30 6. Creation 4 - 02:00 7. Outro – 02:30

GT Legends (Windows) GT Legends (2005) by SimBin Development Team AB and published by 10tacle Studios AG, brings classic racing to life, letting players experience the thrill of vintage GT and touring cars from the '60s and '70s. With over 90 authentic models like Ford Mustangs, Chevrolet Camaros, Shelby Cobras, Alfa Romeos, Austin Healey's, BMWs, and Ferraris, the game allows players to build and upgrade their garage by winning races and earning credits.

🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨

The game features over 25 real-world track variations and offers five difficulty levels, from Beginner to Professional, where AI strength and driving assists scale accordingly. GT Legends is designed with both Single Player and online Multiplayer modes, supporting up to 16 players. Its career mode, Cup Championship Challenge, starts players with two initial cars—a Mini Cooper and a Ford Lotus Cortina—and requires a podium finish to unlock further stages, progressing through increasingly powerful car classes and eventually leading to the FIA Championships.

🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨🏎️🏁🚗💨

For more Back Cover to AI Art videos check out these playlists

Season 1 of Back Cover to AI Art https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJOZYl1h1CGhd82prEQGWAVxY3wuQlx3

Season 2 of Back Cover to AI Art https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJOZYl1h1CEdLNgql_n-7b20wZwo_yAD

Season 3 of Back Cover to AI Art https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJOZYl1h1CHAkMAVlNiJUFVkQMeFUeTX

[lovetogether]

Work shopping an oc who’s a tv head nd we are trying so hard to map out how to make them look nice… any robotic body suggestions?

[jcmarchi]

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review - An Old Star Rises - Game Informer

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/eiyuden-chronicle-hundred-heroes-review-an-old-star-rises-game-informer/

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Review - An Old Star Rises - Game Informer

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” A small child dressed as legally distinct Sailor Moon chirped this trite little phrase at me about an hour into Rabbit and Bear’s Suikoden successor Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. I’m not sure when I realized the adage applies to Hundred Heroes itself as much as it did to whatever the child was talking about. It might’ve been after I met a cleric whose vices included violence and foul language; but whenever it was, it encouraged me to overlook the misgivings Hundred Heroes’ poor first impressions raised in me, and there were plenty. Hundred Heroes adheres a bit too closely to outdated design conventions, but the strength of its writing and characters makes up for its short-sightedness.

Rabbit and Bear were serious when they promised a modern Suikoden-like. You play as Nowa, a member of the Eltisweiss Watch mercenary corps devoted to keeping the peace. What starts as a piddling series of errands for nearby villages soon turns into something more serious as Nowa and the Watch get drawn into conflicts that threaten their beliefs and the entire world. Also, like Suikoden, Hundred Heroes divides its time between world exploration, where you pick up quests and new characters, battles, and dungeon crawling, the latter of which is basically an excuse for more battles.

Hundred Heroes also sticks pretty close to Suikoden 2’s combat with a few refreshing expansions. Your team includes up to six active characters with skills you can augment with runes, which grant different abilities and buffs, and each character gets several rune slots that allow for extensive customization. The system is satisfying in itself but comes into its own once you start linking character attacks and forming unique combos.

As the name suggests, recruiting the game’s 100-plus heroes plays a big role. Some join automatically, but the more interesting ones have a quest associated with them that gives a bit more insight into their personality and place in the world. They often play a minor role in the story after that, but their detailed sprite animations and voiced lines still make them feel like part of the story and not an afterthought.

The setup sounds too familiar, but despite writer Yoshitaka Murayama drawing clear inspiration from his previous works, Hundred Heroes never feels derivative and eventually surpasses its source material. It owes much of its personality to that strong cast of brilliantly written characters and a willingness to embrace humor and the ridiculous as a way to cut deeper with its serious themes of autonomy and equity.

They also save Hundred Heroes from itself. Slow traversal, an empty world map, and tedious dungeons make Hundred Heroes more frustrating than it should be, but the promise of a new character vignette or more plot advancement was always enough to keep me pressing forward.

Hundred Heroes expands Suikoden’s base-building feature with new guilds and groups for your party members to form. At a glance, that seems like busywork, and it is. But it also represents something deeper. Your castle is a microcosm of Hundred Heroes’ themes, a small society of people who look, act, and think nothing alike but who respect each other and fight for the right to live freely, without hate.

In battle, a robust AI system lets you program commands and let your party deal with weaker enemies based on how you’ve customized their runes. Boss fights are just complex enough that they demand your full attention, though, thanks in some part to the gimmick feature. These live up to their name, for better and worse, such as making you guess where an enemy will move or forcing you to attack a specific object. They’re a nice change of pace at first but quickly outstay their welcome.

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is a good reminder of why the RPG genre left some parts of its Golden Age behind. It’s also a testimony to what makes the genre special and the power of good storytelling to move and inspire. Admittedly, rigid adherence to archaic structures makes those first impressions tough to look past, but a creative battle system, extensive party customization, and top-notch writing make up for the retro jank.

[raccoonscupoftea]

🎮A Gamers profession

Timeskip!Kenma Kozume X F!Y/n

Summary: Y/n and Kenma are a couple, also living together. While Kenma is streaming and struggling with a game, he soon admitted to need help from you, a professional game breaker.

Warnings: Nerd talk, SFW, possible grammar mistakes, cause english is not my native language.

| MASTERLIST | REQUESTS |

//----//----//----//

You love your job. It's fun, well paying and not so stressful. Kenma, your boyfriend, also likes your job, but sometimes he just wants you to stuff your face with a pillow when he's playing, especially when he's livestreaming.

You often get to know the next top game before everyone else. You get information on a game while it's still in the making and you have to play the game for endless hours before it's officiall release.

You're not designing the game or anything. No, you're here to break the game into pieces, testing limits, testing the code, testing AI. If it breaks, then the developers have more work to do. Or they simply just decide it is going to be a 'feature'. It's their choice. You just deliver the bugs to them.

So, then why does kenma want to shut you up sometimes?

Because of your job, you have developed a very good sense for game mechanics, attack patterns and the more advanced stuff on how a game is build. When Kenma encounteres a boss, he just knows you could beat it in a few minutes. He knows you could rush to an over the top overpowered boss and never get hit once, thou it would take longer to beat it.

It's when Kenma's visibly is frustrated, staring at his screen with an unhealthy posture, you then sometimes get up from your couch and take a look at what he's struggling with. As soon as you got into frame the viewers will start to spam the chat with messages about you.

Mostly just spamming your name but others will write absurd things like "mama's here to help" or "the professional is watching"

You just have to stand behind the chair and kenma starts to tell you to not say anything.

"Don't you dare tell me, I want to find it out myself" he complains and you just put up your hands "I didn't do anything, I'm just watching, but tell me if you need help"

So far he never needed help from you. He of course is an intelligent and very good gamer himself. Never have you doubted him.

___

You're currently on your own pc in a separate Office in your and Kenma's home. With a switch controller in your hands and feet up on a footrest, you happily enjoy playing some animal crossing on the bigger screen of your gaming setup.

Today's quiet cold so you're wearing a wearable blanked with a hoodie combined. It looks like a cat. On your table is a steaming hot tea, waiting to be cooled down a little. You were fishing all around the island in game to get the last fish of the museum collection, but the sporadic waves of tiredness are definitely not doing you a favour when it comes to pressing the right button at the right time. The game definitely knows how to get you so relaxed you could fall asleep right then and there in your gaming chair.

Another wave made you a little more tired than the usual waves. This time you had doze off for a few seconds before jolting back awake and continued your fishing spree. Work definitely was a bit to much with the winter holidays coming up and a lot of new games wanting to be released in early spring. Is also added up to your tiredness.

You glanced over to the time on your Pc and realised it's only 4pm, definitely to early to sleep now. You also know that Kenma was streaming for an hour now, since he always starts at 3pm.

Thou you don't learn from your mistake to play animal crossing while nearly dozing off and just continued, but rather than fishing you instead decided to continue to decorate the island.

It went well for the first hour. You made a plan and checked on the internet if there's the suitable furniture for it. The first decorations had been placed on their right spot, paths has been made but just a few minutes after the first hour, the tiredness has claimed you back.

While you were in the office relaxing every bone to a complete flat line, the person in the other office was nearly about to destroy a keyboard. The boss he was fighting was beating kenma every time to 0 HP. Kenma had stopped yesterday's stream in a near rage quit but today he had to beat it to get further in the game. He hasn't got past the boss and was getting more and more frustrated as well as confused. Sometimes he swears the boss just doesn't take damage and gets a massive attack bonus. Chat is convinced the boss wasn't beatable and was begging to kenma to bring out the game breaker, aka you.

Of course, he denied it at first but after an hour of trying and dying he finally gave up. Without a word he placed down his headphones, pushed his microphone back a little bit and walked out of the frame. His viewers were ecstatic and surprised that he'll need help from you.

As kenma was busting open the door to your office, the loud noise of the door made you jolt up from your chair. Your hair went places and the hoodie blanket went all the way up to your chin, telling kenma without a word that you were sleeping in your chair just now.

"I was definitely not sleeping" You stated in your defense with a sleep drunk voice, but Kenma did not believe you and smiled at how cuddly you looked. With a quick glance at the time you asked the streamer "Quit already? You're usually up till late at night"

Kenma placed his hands in the pocket of the black hoodie he's wearing and sighed, remembering why he's here in the first place "I think the game's bugged. I can't defeat the boss. I tried so many times" He slightly looked away, feeling a bit embarrassed about asking you.

At the word 'bugged' you stood up, placed the switch controller on the desk and walked over to him. You slipped your hands into his hoodie and took his hands in your own. "let's see what I can do"

The two of you went to his streaming room, but before you entered, the hood from your blanket hoodie went over your head to hide this atrocious mess of hair on your head. You quickly checked your appearance in the hallway mirror. As soon as the viewers got a glance at you and what you're wearing, they all typed in chat 'You're looking so cozy rn' 'where did you buy it?' 'looks so fluffy' 'I want to cuddle with you'

You waved at the camera to greed the viewers and kenma gestured you to sit down in his chair. You smiled at your boyfriend and placed your feet also on the chair, making you a cozy fluffy blanket ball.

He then quickly explained to you what he was doing and what was happening. Kenma then also pulled over another chair to sit down and watch you. You first tried your best max out attack and defence with his current equipment, but there wasn't even a slightest chance. You voiced out a small "Huh?" Before trying again.

The viewers could see on your face that something was up. You aren't a streamer and wasn't talking while playing the game and kenma knew to not disturb your concentration, but the viewers still seemed to enjoy watching you trying the best you could. It was the first time you were seriously playing a game with the intention to win and they were all very ecstatic as you tried to not get hit. One could tell how everyone was excited at this moment, the chat also was getting slower.

After half an hour, you had placed down the controller. The boss could hit the hero, because they weren't dodging anymore and the player dies in an instant. The question marks around your head were very visible. Something definitely is not right here. As soon as the game went to its pause menu, the viewers knew something serious it about to happen.

You grabbed the laptop from Kenma, booted it up, put in his password without a fail and went to the internet. The website from your work company appeared after a few clicks and at this moment Kenma realised what was happening.

He looked over to his camera and explained laughing "Guys, I apparently found a bug. Stuffs about to get serious now" The chat was then filled with suprised emojis. It didn't took 5 minutes and a donation came in.

Kenma glanced over to the donation site and read out loud "Thank you catlover51 for the..." He stopped a second as he saw the amount that was donated and was clearly surprised "Thank you for the 100$ and you had written down 'For Y/n, a little compensation gor having to work now' again thank you very much. You really didn't neet to donate so much"

As Kenma read the donation out loud you had began to smile behind the laptop sceen. Others then jumped onto the train as well and donated money from a single dollar to a little lager than 50$. Kenma was slightly overwhelmed my the sheer amount of donations that came in and couldn't stop thanking everyone, nearly shutting down the donation site so no one could waste more money on them. It was then you who calmed them down after finishing your research. You looked back to the camera and placed the laptop to the side "You don't need to pay me for this. It's my job and I love doing it. Also I get paid whenever I work, so I'm currently earning my money. But thank you for your concern" you smiled brightly at them before continuing to try out stuff in the game.

After some time nothing came out of the testing and you sighed. You glance over to your boyfriend, looking like a vet having to tell the owner some bad news. "You can't progress at this point, I'm sorry" His eyes widend "That's a joke right?" You just shook your head "Unfortunately not. You have found a very devastating bug, which stops you from killing the boss. As soon as an attack misses, the supposed damage gets stored and well... When the boss does hit you, then all of that stored damage gets released. That explains the bug with the one shot kill. This bug alone is manageable and already a known issue, but combined with the boss not taking any damage" you smiled at him with a sad face. "I'm sorry"

Kenma sighed and ruffled his hair "It's not your fault" he smiled and ruffled your hair as well. "Guess my save is busted then"

You took his hand in yours and looked him in the eyes. He squeezed your hand a little and looked back at you. There's a little spark in your eyes, telling him that there's something you could do "What are you up to?" He asked directly. Your eyes shift away, making you look innocent, scratching your cheek a little "I could force you out of the situation, by glitching you through a wall"

Usually kenma is against using glitches and exploits in his runs, but this is maybe the first occasion he'll consider it. He first looks at you with squinted eyes but then stood up "I'm going to the bathroom. Whatever you'll do, I'll don't know about it"

You're smile got bigger as he finished talking and went outside. He closed the door and after a little happy dance, you pressed onto respawn and forced the player to another part of the map. The viewers were watching your every step and were happy about you breaking a game infront of them.

As you were finished, you quickly saved the game and stood up, ready to leave.

"In my defence" you started talking into the camera a little bowed down to fit into the frame "I did not test this part of the game. Not my fault" You grabbed the open laptop and blew the viewers a goodbye kiss before you exited the streaming room.

On the way back to your own office, Kenma has finished his bathroom break. He grabbed your wrist before you could vanish into your room. He also grabbed the laptop and placed it on a sideboard. One hand of his wandered over to your waist, so he could pull you a little closer to him. "Thank you" he whisperd and gave you a little kiss on your cheek. "I'll make sure to finish today's stream a little earlier. Can't wait to cuddle you with this fluffy hoodie" he then again kissed your other cheek and headed back over to his room to see an alive character on a giant grassy field.

You on the other hand smiled and had to control your inner fangirl to not just scream and jump around. The viewers for sure could hear you if you were to loud.

You quickly grabbed Kenma's laptop and hid in your room, filling out a formula to get the new bug over to the Developers.

[krissiefox]

Here's a collection of sites where you can get sound effects and ambience for your projects!

https://freesound.org/ Freesound is a great resource for royalty free and copyright free sounds. Each sound comes with a creative commons license, some of which require credit, so make sure to check those!

https://www.sounds-resource.com/ Sounds resource is an archive of sounds from various video games and PC games, so while they can't be used for anything commercial, you may be able to use them for things like videos or fan games.

https://www.humblebundle.com/software Humble bundle regularly hosts fundraiser bundles of software and game design assets, including sound effects and ambience. You can also put money from your purchase forward the bundles charity. Sadly, humble bundle also puts out bundles of AI books, though, so it's up to you if you think the good outweighs the bad here.

Unreal Marketplace If your project is an Unreal Engine 4/5 game, check out what the Unreal marketplace has to offer! They offer both free and paid sound effect packs for your games. Some you can download as wav files without Unreal Engine installed, as well!

https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/ Another nice resource of free and royalty free sound effects! Attribution is not required, but appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/ Youtube can be a great place to find copyright free/royalty free sounds too! To get the sounds form the videos, you can use a tool such as mediahuman's youtube-to-mp3 converter.

https://www.gamedevmarket.net/category/audio/sound-fx A paid store where you can find all sorts of sounds and ambience for your video game projects! Humble bundle seems to do bundles with them pretty often so you may want to look into that to save some money here, too.

https://sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc An archive of free and copyright free sound effect packs from the Game Developers Conference! A new pack seems to be added every year, too. :)

https://getsoundly.com/ Soundly is a program more than website, but I have tried it myself and you can get free sound effects from it, and you can get additional sounds if you pay for the pro version as well.

https://www.boomlibrary.com/ While this sound effect site is primarily a paid one, you can get a free monthly bundle of sound effects if you subscribe to their mailing list!

https://blipsounds.com/community-library/ Another great library of free sounds from the Blip Studios community!

https://www.zapsplat.com/ They require you to make an account before downloading anything, but this is another site with lots of free sound effects for your projects!

Itch Io Itch Io is another great resource for both free and paid sound effects!

[theomeganerd]

The Witcher 4 Tech Demo Debuts

CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games Present The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo at The State of Unreal 2025!

At Unreal Fest Orlando, the State of Unreal keynote opened with a live on-stage presentation that offered an early glimpse into the latest Unreal Engine 5 features bringing the open world of The Witcher 4 to life.

Spotlight:

Tech demo showcased how the CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games are working together to power the world of The Witcher 4 on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, and bring large open-world support to Unreal Engine. The tech demo takes place in the never-before-seen region of Kovir.

As Unreal Fest 2025 kicked off, CD PROJEKT RED joined Epic Games on stage to present a tech demo of The Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). Presented in typical CDPR style, the tech demo follows the main protagonist Ciri in the midst of a monster contract and shows off some of the innovative UE5 technology and features that will power the game’s open world.

The tech demo takes place in the region of Kovir — which will make its very first appearance in the video game series in The Witcher 4. The presentation followed main protagonist Ciri — along with her horse Kelpie — as she made her way through the rugged mountains and dense forests of Kovir to the bustling port town of Valdrest. Along the way, CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games dove deep into how each feature is helping drive performance, visual fidelity, and shape The Witcher 4’s immersive open world.

 Watch the full presentation from Unreal Fest 2025 now at LINK.

Since the strategic partnership was announced in 2022, CDPR has been working with Epic Games to develop new tools and enhance existing features in Unreal Engine 5 to expand the engine’s open-world development capabilities and establish robust tools geared toward CD PROJEKT RED’s open-world design philosophies. The demo, which runs on a PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second, shows off in-engine capabilities set in the world of The Witcher 4, including the new Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage rendering, MetaHuman technology with Mass AI crowd scaling, and more. The tools showcased are being developed, tested, and eventually released to all UE developers, starting with today’s Unreal Engine 5.6 release. This will help other studios create believable and immersive open-world environments that deliver performance at 60 FPS without compromising on quality — even at vast scales. While the presentation was running on a PlayStation console, the features and technology will be supported across all platforms the game will launch on.

The Unreal Animation Framework powers realistic character movements in busy scenes. FastGeo Streaming, developed in collaboration with Epic Games, allows environments to load quickly and smoothly. Nanite Foliage fills forests and fields with dense detail without sacrificing performance. The Mass system handles large, dynamic crowds with ease, while ML Deformer adds subtle, realistic touches to character animation — right down to muscle movement.

Speaking on The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, Joint-CEO of CD PROJEKT RED, 

Michał Nowakowski stated:

“We started our partnership with Epic Games to push open-world game technology forward. To show this early look at the work we’ve been doing using Unreal Engine running at 60 FPS on PlayStation 5, is a significant milestone — and a testament of the great cooperation between our teams. But we're far from finished. I look forward to seeing more advancements and inspiring technology from this partnership as development of The Witcher 4 on Unreal Engine 5 continues.”

Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games said: 

“CD PROJEKT RED is one of the industry’s best open-world game studios, and we’re grateful that they’re working with us to push Unreal Engine forward with The Witcher 4. They are the perfect partner to help us develop new world-building features that we can share with all Unreal Engine developers.”

For more information on The Witcher 4, please visit the official website. More information about The Witcher series can be found on the official official website, X, Bluesky, and Facebook.

[budgetgameruae]

Best PC for Data Science & AI with 12GB GPU at Budget Gamer UAE

Are you looking for a powerful yet affordable PC for Data Science, AI, and Deep Learning? Budget Gamer UAE brings you the best PC for Data Science with 12GB GPU that handles complex computations, neural networks, and big data processing without breaking the bank!

Why Do You Need a 12GB GPU for Data Science & AI?

Before diving into the build, let’s understand why a 12GB GPU is essential:

✅ Handles Large Datasets – More VRAM means smoother processing of big data. ✅ Faster Deep Learning – Train AI models efficiently with CUDA cores. ✅ Multi-Tasking – Run multiple virtual machines and experiments simultaneously. ✅ Future-Proofing – Avoid frequent upgrades with a high-capacity GPU.

Best Budget Data Science PC Build – UAE Edition

Here’s a cost-effective yet high-performance PC build tailored for AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science in the UAE.

1. Processor (CPU): AMD Ryzen 7 5800X

8 Cores / 16 Threads – Perfect for parallel processing.

3.8GHz Base Clock (4.7GHz Boost) – Speeds up data computations.

PCIe 4.0 Support – Faster data transfer for AI workloads.

2. Graphics Card (GPU): NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB

12GB GDDR6 VRAM – Ideal for deep learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch).

CUDA Cores & RT Cores – Accelerates AI model training.

DLSS Support – Boosts performance in AI-based rendering.

3. RAM: 32GB DDR4 (3200MHz)

Smooth Multitasking – Run Jupyter Notebooks, IDEs, and virtual machines effortlessly.

Future-Expandable – Upgrade to 64GB if needed.

4. Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD + 2TB HDD

Ultra-Fast Boot & Load Times – NVMe SSD for OS and datasets.

Extra HDD Storage – Store large datasets and backups.

5. Motherboard: B550 Chipset

PCIe 4.0 Support – Maximizes GPU and SSD performance.

Great VRM Cooling – Ensures stability during long AI training sessions.

6. Power Supply (PSU): 650W 80+ Gold

Reliable & Efficient – Handles high GPU/CPU loads.

Future-Proof – Supports upgrades to more powerful GPUs.

7. Cooling: Air or Liquid Cooling

AMD Wraith Cooler (Included) – Good for moderate workloads.

Optional AIO Liquid Cooler – Better for overclocking and heavy tasks.

8. Case: Mid-Tower with Good Airflow

Multiple Fan Mounts – Keeps components cool during extended AI training.

Cable Management – Neat and efficient build.

Why Choose Budget Gamer UAE for Your Data Science PC?

✔ Custom-Built for AI & Data Science – No pre-built compromises. ✔ Competitive UAE Pricing – Best deals on high-performance parts. ✔ Expert Advice – Get guidance on the perfect build for your needs. ✔ Warranty & Support – Reliable after-sales service.

Performance Benchmarks – How Does This PC Handle AI Workloads?

TaskPerformanceTensorFlow Training2x Faster than 8GB GPUsPython Data AnalysisSmooth with 32GB RAMNeural Network TrainingHandles large models efficientlyBig Data ProcessingNVMe SSD reduces load times

FAQs – Data Science PC Build in UAE

1. Is a 12GB GPU necessary for Machine Learning?

Yes! More VRAM allows training larger models without memory errors.

2. Can I use this PC for gaming too?

Absolutely! The RTX 3060 12GB crushes 1080p/1440p gaming.

3. Should I go for Intel or AMD for Data Science?

AMD Ryzen offers better multi-core performance at a lower price.

4. How much does this PC cost in the UAE?

Approx. AED 4,500 – AED 5,500 (depends on deals & upgrades).

5. Where can I buy this PC in the UAE?

Check Budget Gamer UAE for the best custom builds!

Final Verdict – Best Budget Data Science PC in UAE

If you're into best PC for Data Science with 12GB GPU PC build from Budget Gamer UAE is the perfect balance of power and affordability. With a Ryzen 7 CPU, RTX 3060, 32GB RAM, and ultra-fast storage, it handles heavy workloads like a champ.

[blue-ten]

Windows 11 and the Last Straw

Bit of a rant coming up. TL;DR I'm tired of Microsoft, so I'm moving to Linux. After Microsoft's announcement of "Recall" and their plans to further push Copilot as some kind of defining feature of the OS, I'm finally done. I feel like that frog in the boiling water analogy, but I'm noticing the bubbles starting to form and it's time to hop out.

The corporate tech sector recently has been such a disaster full of blind bandwagon hopping (NFTs, ethically dubious "AI" datasets trained on artwork scraped off the net, and creative apps trying to incorporate features that feed off of those datasets). Each and every time it feels like insult to injury toward the arts in general. The out of touch CEOs and tech billionaires behind all this don't understand art, they don't value art, and they never will.

Thankfully, I have a choice. I don't have to let Microsoft feature-creep corporate spyware into my PC. I don't have to let them waste space and CPU cycles on a glorified chatbot that wants me to press the "make art" button. I'm moving to Linux, and I've been inadvertently prepping myself to do it for over a decade now.

I like testing out software: operating systems, web apps, anything really, but especially art programs. Over the years, the open-source community has passionately and tirelessly developed projects like Krita, Inkscape, and Blender into powerhouses that can actually compete in their spaces. All for free, for artists who just want to make things. These are people, real human beings, that care about art and creativity. And every step of the way while Microsoft et al began rotting from the inside, FOSS flourished and only got better. They've more than earned trust from me.

I'm not announcing my move to Linux just to be dramatic and stick it to the man (although it does feel cathartic, haha). I'm going to be using Krita, Inkscape, GIMP, and Blender for all my art once I make the leap, and I'm going to share my experiences here! Maybe it'll help other artists in the long run! I'm honestly excited about it. I worked on the most recent page of Everblue entirely in Krita, and it was a dream how well it worked for me.

Addendum: I'm aware that Microsoft says things like, "Copilot is optional," "Recall is offline, it doesn't upload or harvest your data," "You can turn all these things off." Uh-huh. All that is only true until it isn't. One day Microsoft will take the user's choice away like they've done so many times before. Fool me once, etc.

[fogaminghub]

🚀✨ Hello, racers! The time has come to rev up your engines because The Crew Motorfest Season 5 Patch Notes have officially dropped! 🌴🌊

With the brand-new FREE map expansion of Maui, 7 new Chase Vehicles, and thrilling playlists like "Made in Japan Vol. 2," there's never been a better time to hit the streets! Check out all the exciting changes, bug fixes, and improvements waiting for you! 🏎️💨

Dive into the full details and get ready for your next adventure!

[mana-sputachu]

Artshield

I was going to flop in bed and try to draw from there, but the sudden swarm of AI shit on another of my accounts fueled me with spite, so I'm writing this post NOW rather than tomorrow when I'll be more awake.

If you can't run Glaze/Nightshade because of the insane specs required for it, give a try to Artshield.

It's a web-based app that will let you load all the pics you want and protect them with a big, invisible watermark all over it. It also has a checker option to use after you've shielded your art, to be sure it worked.

Now, I'm terrible with math so I can't explain how it exactly work, but here's the explanation on their blog. If someone who's more math-savvy than me wants to add a simpler explanation to this post, please do!

While it can't poison AIs like Nightshade does, it's still a good solution if you can't run Glaze/Nightshade on your pc... like many of us, really. As I wrote on another post about Glaze, I have a pretty decent gaming pc that, while not being like high-end or anything (my GPU is a RTX 3060), suits my needs perfectly and runs all the games I'm interested in (Tekken 8's demo being the most recent thing).

Yet, in order to try Nightshade, I had to close all the apps I had running in the background, which were, in that moment, Opera and Discord. Only when I shut them down, it finally started. 10 minutes for the mid setting and the result was awful.

I tried WebGlaze (not Cara yet), and the results were also awful, given you can't control the strenght of the glazing much.

I understand it might be hard to develop this kind of technology, but I wish they would meet us halfway since the majority of people use old machines, laptops (a friend of mine tried running Glaze on hers and the fans started spinning like it was ready to fly) or even just tablets and phones, so those specs are hard to meet.

That's why I want to share Artshield, as a solution for those of you who can't run Glaze and Nightshade.

Artshield's only big limitation is that it won't work with white backgrounds, so try to add a color layer to your white background before shielding it. Same for B/W images.

Other tips I can suggest for trying to protect your works:

Post at the lowest resolution you can: I go for 72 DPI, keeping bigger sizes and high quality files only for Ko-Fi rewards and clients' files

Add a noise filter: I always do this because I like the paper-like, grainy feel it gives to my art, but I read once it might messes with AI's scrapers. While I don't know if this is still true, it's worth trying it

Don't forget a big visible watermark (aside from the Artshield one)!

Hope this will help other strugglin artists, I never see Artshield suggested around, especially in posts about Glaze and Nightshade, so I decided to write this one.

Go and shield your art!

[saruin]

inZoi came out in EA! Looks good and apparently the house building is intuitive, but i find it kind of funny that only one of the reviewers mentions gameplay.

The review that does, is negative. Apparently, it's just an empty sandbox rn (which, fair) but that person heavily recommends not getting it if you're looking for actual life sim gameplay.

All the other reviews praise the graphics and the building and the chara creator. That's...great and all, but what about the game?

I'm not interested in inzoi

For various reasons but the biggest 2 is generative AI and the hyper realism.

I don't have to explain about the Ai

Hyper realistic graphics aren't appealing to me and I tend to stay away from games that use them, the ones I do play are few and far between.

That said all I have heard as well has been negative reviews I've gotten secondhand through people who are following Inzoi's development.

Also all that aside I heard it was a beast of a game that requires a pretty good computer to run it. Even if I was interested I can't even hold all my mods on my laptop cause the storage capacity is so shitty and I don't make enough for a high end PC.

[satoshi-mochida]

No Sleep For Kaname Date - From AI: The Somnium Files announced for Switch, PC - Gematsu

Spike Chunsoft has announced No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files, a new entry in the AI: The Somnium Files series. It will launch for Switch and PC via Steam on July 25, 2025 worldwide with English and Japanese voice-overs, and English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese text.

Here is an overview of the game, via Spike Chunsoft:

About

The player takes on the role of Kaname Date, the protagonist, and once again teams up with the AI-Ball, Aiba, to tackle a mysterious case and rescue Iris, an internet idol who has been forced to take part in a dangerous escape game. No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files introduces a new gameplay element: “Escape.” As with previous games, in “Investigation,” players will examine crime scenes and listen to testimonies. In “Somnium,” players enter the dream worlds of suspects and key witnesses. In the new “Escape” sections, players will solve puzzles to break out locked rooms. By moving between these three sections, players can obtain the necessary clues to solve the case. The game’s director Kazuya Yamada (Spike Chunsoft) is writing the scenario, with Kotaro Uchikoshi, the previous scenario writer, overseeing as the series director. Yusuke Kozaki returns as character designer, and Keisuke Ito continues as the music composer.

Story

A day after The New Cyclops Serial Killings was resolved, internet idol Iris Sagan (known as “A-set”) is abducted by a UFO and forced to participate in a perilous escape game called The Third Eye Game. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, a mysterious device is discovered. It resembles a coffin, and attached to it is a note that reads: “Psync me.” Relying on a tenuous line of communication with the missing Iris, one man rises once again, determined to track down the UFO that should not even exist. Together with his partner, the AI-Ball Aiba, he sets out on a quest. That man…is Special Agent Kaname Date.

Staff

Producer: Yasu Iizuka

Director and Scenario Writer: Kazuya Yamada

Series Director / Scenario Supervisor: Kotaro Uchikoshi

Character Designer: Yusuke Kozaki

Music Composer: Keisuke Ito

Special Messages from Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazuya Yamada

Associate Scenario Director Kotaro Uchikoshi: “For this title, I’m serving as the ‘scenario advisor’ from the perspective of overseeing the entire series. From the beginning, I trusted the development staff, but I was filled with awe at the quality, which far exceeded my expectations. The core element of this game, the ‘escape game,’ is not just a collection of puzzles; it has been intricately woven with a deep thematic significance, and its difficulty is perfectly balanced…! I believe both core and casual players will definitely enjoy it. This game is a heartfelt anthem of love created by the staff who love the AI series, for all the fans who also love the AI series.”

Director and Scenario Writer Kazuya Yamada: “I am Kazuya Yamada, the director and scenario writer for this project. We’ve been able to bring this title to you thanks to all of you who said, ‘I want to see Date as the protagonist once again.’ Thank you so much. As we considered how to make this title as satisfying as possible, we ended up cramming so much into it that it caused a lot of trouble for the development team. However, because of that, we believe we’ve created a title that everyone will enjoy. So please look forward to it.”

Watch the announcement trailer below. View the first screenshots at the gallery.

Nintendo Direct: March 27, 2025

English

Japanese

[elbiotipo]

fwiw and i have no idea what the artists are doing with it, a lot of the libraries that researchers are currently using to develop deep learning models from scratch are all open source built upon python, i'm sure monsanto has its own proprietary models hand crafted to make life as shitty as possible in the name of profit, but for research there's a lot of available resources library and dataset wise in related fields. It's not my area per se but i've learnt enough to get by in potentially applying it to my field within science, and largely the bottleneck in research is that the servers and graphics cards you need to train your models at a reasonable pace are of a size you can usually only get from google or amazon or facebook (although some rich asshole private universities from the US can actually afford the cost of the kind of server you need. But that's a different issue wrt resource availability in research in the global south. Basically: mas plata para la universidad pública la re puta que los parió)

Yes, one great thing about software development is that for every commercially closed thing there are open source versions that do better.

The possibilities for science are enormous. Gigantic. Much of modern science is based on handling huge amounts of data no human can process at once. Specially trained models can be key to things such as complex genetics, especially simulating proteomes. They already have been used there to incredible effect, but custom models are hard to make, I think AIs that can be reconfigured to particular cases might change things in a lot of fields forever.

I am concerned, however, of the overconsumption of electronics this might lead to when everyone wants their pet ChatGPT on their PC, but this isn't a thing that started with AI, electronic waste and planned obsolescence is already wasting countless resources in chips just to feed fashion items like iphones, this is a matter of consumption and making computers be more modular and longer lasting as the tools they are. I've also read that models recently developed in China consume much, much less resources and could potentially be available in common desktop computers, things might change as quickly as in 2 years.

[mariacallous]

For a while in the mid-2000s, a refrigerator-sized box in Abu Dhabi was considered the greatest chess player in the world. Its name was Hydra, and it was a small super-computer—a cabinet full of industrial-grade processors and specially designed chips, strung together with fiber-optic cables and jacked into the internet.

At a time when chess was still the main gladiatorial arena for competition between humans and AI, Hydra and its exploits were briefly the stuff of legend. The New Yorker published a contemplative 5,000-word feature about its emergent creativity; WIRED declared Hydra “fearsome”; and chess publications covered its victories with the violence of wrestling commentary. Hydra, they wrote, was a “monster machine” that “slowly strangled” human grand masters.

True to form as a monster, Hydra was also isolated and strange. Other advanced chess engines at the time—Hydra’s rivals—ran on ordinary PCs and were available for anyone to download. But the full power of Hydra’s 32-processor cluster could be used by only one person at a time. And by the summer of 2005, even the members of Hydra’s development team were struggling to get a turn with their creation.

That’s because the team’s patron—the then 36-year-old Emirati man who’d hired them and put up the money for Hydra’s souped-up hardware—was too busy reaping his reward. On an online chess forum in 2005, Hydra’s Austrian chief architect, Chrilly Donninger, described this benefactor as the greatest “computer chess freak” alive. “The sponsor,” he wrote, “loves to play day and night with Hydra.”

Under the username zor_champ, the Emirati sponsor would log in to online chess tournaments and, with Hydra, play as a human-computer team. More often than not, they would trounce the competition. “He loved the power of man plus machine,” one engineer told me. “He loved to win.”

Hydra eventually got overtaken by other chess computers and was discontinued in the late 2000s. But zor_champ went on to become one of the most powerful, least understood men in the world. His real name is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan.

A bearded, wiry figure who’s almost never seen without dark sunglasses, Tahnoun is the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser—the intelligence chief to one of the world’s wealthiest and most surveillance-happy small nations. He’s also the younger brother of the country’s hereditary, autocratic president, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan. But perhaps most important, and most bizarrely for a spymaster, Tahnoun wields official control over much of Abu Dhabi’s vast sovereign wealth. Bloomberg News reported last year that he directly oversees a $1.5 trillion empire—more cash than just about anyone on the planet.

In his personal style, Tahnoun comes across as one-third Gulf royal, one-third fitness-obsessed tech founder, and one-third Bond villain. Among his many, many business interests, he presides over a sprawling tech conglomerate called G42 (a reference to the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “42” is a super-computer’s answer to the question of “life, the universe, and everything”). G42 has a hand in everything from AI research to biotechnology—with special areas of strength in state-sponsored hacking and surveillance tech. Tahnoun is fanatical about Brazilian jiujitsu and cycling. He wears his sunglasses even at the gym because of a sensitivity to light, and he surrounds himself with UFC champions and mixed martial arts fighters.

According to a businessman and a security consultant who’ve met with Tahnoun, visitors who make it past his layers of loyal gatekeepers might get a chance to speak with him only after cycling laps with the sheikh around his private velodrome. He has been known to spend hours in a flotation chamber, the consultant says, and has flown health guru Peter Attia into the UAE to offer guidance on longevity. According to a businessman who was present for the discussion, Tahnoun even inspired Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, to cut back on fast food and join him in a quest to live to 150.

But in recent years, a new quest has taken up much of Sheikh Tahnoun’s attention. His onetime chess and technology obsession has morphed into something far bigger: a hundred-billion-dollar campaign to turn Abu Dhabi into an AI superpower. And the teammate he’s set out to buy this time is the United States tech industry itself.

In the multiplayer game of strategy that is the AI arms race, the US controls the board right now for a pretty simple reason. A single American hardware company, Nvidia, makes the chips that train the most competitive AI models—and the US government has moved to restrict who can buy these Nvidia GPUs (as the chips are called) outside the country’s borders. To take advantage of this clear but jittery lead over China, the CEOs of America’s AI giants have fanned out across the globe to sweet-talk the world’s richest investors—people like Tahnoun—into financing what amounts to an enormous building boom.

Lurking behind every synthetic podcast and serving of AI slop is a huge, thrumming data center: Hundreds of Hydra-sized server cabinets lined up in tight rows, running computing processes that are tens or hundreds of times more energy-intensive than ordinary web searches. And behind those is another set of data centers that train foundational AI models. To keep pace with demand, AI companies need more data centers all over the world—plus the land to put them on, the water to cool them, the electricity to power them, and the microchips to run them. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that tech companies will pour a trillion dollars into new AI data centers over the next five years.

Building out the next phase of AI, in short, is set to require mind-boggling amounts of capital, real estate, and electricity—and the Gulf States, with their vast oil wealth and energy resources, possess all three. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar have all set up major AI investment funds in the past couple of years. But as a home for new data centers and a source of investment capital, the UAE has emerged as a particularly attractive potential partner on a number of fronts—from its sheer wealth to its brand-new nuclear power supply to the relative sophistication of its own AI sector.

But there’s a rub: Any American AI partnership with the UAE is, in some way, a relationship with Sheikh Tahnoun himself—and for years many of Tahnoun’s most important technology partners have been Chinese.

The pairing was only natural, given Tahnoun’s record as a spy chief with vast commercial interests in high-tech state control. Tahnoun spent the early 2020s forging deep business and personal ties with Beijing, to the point that some products sold by G42 came to be nearly indistinguishable from Chinese ones. A G42 subsidiary called Presight AI, for one, sold surveillance software to police forces worldwide that bore a close resemblance to systems used by Chinese law enforcement. The Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s footprints in G42 went even deeper. Early in the generative-AI boom, Huawei’s engineers moved freely through Abu Dhabi’s most sensitive tech facilities as they designed massive AI training centers.

But in August of 2023, Washington threw down a gauntlet. It restricted exports of Nvidia GPUs to the Middle East—the very hardware that Abu Dhabi needed to realize its own AI ambitions. No company using Huawei equipment would get access. So Tahnoun pivoted, hard. In early 2024, G42 announced it was severing ties with China and would rip out Chinese equipment. Chinese nationals began quietly departing Abu Dhabi’s tech sector.

At the same time, US and UAE leaders went into a fevered phase of mutual courtship. Scores of public relations consultants, lawyers, and Beltway lobbyists set about portraying Tahnoun as a safe pair of hands in which to place US technology and trust. Marty Edelman, the emirate’s most trusted American lawyer, helped orchestrate the strategy from New York. The UAE’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, deployed his considerable political capital to vouch for Tahnoun. Meanwhile, US government and tech leaders tried to maneuver what promised to be a huge spigot of Emirati money into the United States, to feed AI companies’ need for investment.

The first sign that the two sides had reached an understanding was, bizarrely, a deal that flowed in the opposite direction. In an unusual agreement brokered largely by officials in the Biden administration, Microsoft announced in April 2024 that it was investing $1.5 billion in Tahnoun’s G42, acquiring a minority stake in the company. According to remarks by a Biden official who helped steer the agreement, the objective was to get G42 to “work with Microsoft as an alternative to Huawei.” In the first phase of the relationship, G42 would gain access to Microsoft’s AI computing power on its Azure cloud platform, at a data center inside the UAE. And Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, would join the board of G42—a kind of American chaperone inside the company.

The big gushers of cash from the UAE were still to come, as were any Nvidia chips for Abu Dhabi. But the Microsoft deal amounted to a US government seal of approval for further business with the Emirates. In the summer of 2024, Tahnoun embarked on a charm offensive across the United States, with a visit to Elon Musk in Texas and a jiujitsu session with Mark Zuckerberg. Meetups with Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos followed in quick succession. The most important meetings, however, took place at the White House, with figures like national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, and President Joe Biden himself.

As the frenzied campaign to reframe Tahnoun and G42’s image seemed to gain traction—and the US seemed poised to loosen export controls on advanced chips for the UAE—some inside the US national security establishment were, just as frantically, waving caution flags. One of their fears is that the intellectual property of the United States could still leak to China. “The Emiratis are the consummate hedgers,” a former senior US security official told me. “The question everyone has: Are they playing both sides?” In a July open letter, US congressman Michael McCaul, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called for “significantly more robust national security guardrails” to be placed on the UAE before the US exported any sensitive technology to the country.

But the other fear is of the UAE itself—a country whose vision of using AI as a mechanism of state control is not all that different from Beijing’s. “The UAE is an authoritarian state with a dismal human rights record and a history of using technology to spy on activists, journalists, and dissidents,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the UAE would like to influence the course of AI development”—in ways that are optimized not for democracy or any “shared human values,” but for police states.

This past summer, around the same time that Tahnoun was barnstorming through America’s dojos and C-suites, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was hosting some of the world’s leading technology thinkers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—at his vast South African hunting estate called Ekland. They visited game parks, were waited on by butlers, and discussed Saudi Arabia’s future role in AI.

Not long after, Schmidt made a trip to the Biden White House to air his concerns that the US cannot produce enough electricity to compete in AI. His suggestion? Closer financial and business ties with hydroelectric-rich Canada. “The alternative is to have the Arabs fund [AI],” he told a group of Stanford students on video the following week. “I like the Arabs personally … But they’re not going to adhere to our national security rules.”

Those concerns over the Gulf States’ reliability as allies (and their tendencies to engage in unsavory practices like targeting journalists and waging proxy wars) haven’t stopped their money from flowing into US tech companies. Earlier in the year, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign Public Investment Fund announced a $40 billion fund focused on AI investments, aided by a strategic partnership with the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Kingdom Holding, an investment firm run by a Saudi royal who is deeply obedient to the crown prince, has also emerged as one of the biggest investors in Elon Musk’s startup xAI.

The New York Times wrote that the new Saudi fund made that country “the world’s largest investor in artificial intelligence.” But in September, the UAE eclipsed it: Abu Dhabi announced that a new AI investment vehicle called MGX would partner with BlackRock, Micro-soft, and Global Infrastructure Partners to pour more than $100 billion into, among other things, building a network of data centers and power plants across the United States. MGX—which is part of Tahnoun’s sovereign wealth portfolio—has also reportedly been in “early talks” with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about what Altman hopes will be a 5 to 7 trillion-dollar moonshot chipmaking venture to create an alternative to Nvidia’s scarce GPUs.

The spigot of Emirati cash was now open. And in turn, within days of the MGX announcement, the news site Semafor reported that the US had cleared Nvidia to sell GPUs to G42. Some of the chips were already being deployed in Abu Dhabi, the news site reported, including “a sizable order of Nvidia H100 models.” The US had finally given Tahnoun some of the hardware he needed to build his next Hydra. Which raises the salience of two questions: What kind of game is Sheikh Tahnoun playing this time? And how exactly did he get control of so much wealth?

on some level, nearly every story about royalty in the Gulf is a story about succession—about paternalistic families trying to ward off external threats, and the internal rivalries that crop up when inherited power is up for grabs.

Tahnoun and his brother Mohamed are both sons of the UAE’s first president, Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan—an iconic figure revered as the father of the nation.

For much of Zayed’s life, what is now the city of Abu Dhabi was an austere, seasonal fishing village with a harsh climate, a brackish water supply, and a nomadic population of about 2,000 people. The rest of the emirate had several thousand more Bedouin inhabitants. As rulers, the al Nahyans were paid in tributes and taxes, and served as custodians of the emirate’s shared resources. Their lifestyle wasn’t all that much better than that of their fellow tribesmen. But still it was dangerous at the top. Before Zayed, two of the last four sheikhs of Abu Dhabi had been assassinated by their brothers; another had been killed by a rival tribe.

Zayed, for his part, seized power from his older brother in a bloodless coup aided by the British in 1966—just as oil and its transformative wealth started flowing into Abu Dhabi. Where his elder sibling resisted spending Abu Dhabi’s new fortune, Zayed embraced modernization, development, and a vision for uniting several tribes under a single state—setting the stage for the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971.

When the UAE was formed, Tahnoun was almost 3 years old. A middle child among Zayed’s 20-odd sons, Tahnoun is one of the so-called Bani Fatima—the six male children of Zayed’s most favored wife, Fatima, and his most important heirs. Zayed groomed these sons to go abroad, become worldly, and take up the mantle of the UAE’s future. But even as he established a state that carefully distributed new oil wealth among Abu Dhabi’s Bedouins, Zayed steered his heirs away from business and self-enrichment. Perhaps mindful of the assassinations and coups that preceded him, Zayed wanted to ward off the perception that the al Nahyans were benefiting unfairly from their role as custodians of the country.

In the mid-1990s, Tahnoun found himself in Southern California. One day in 1995 he walked into a Brazilian jiujitsu dojo in San Diego, asking to be trained. He introduced himself as “Ben” and, according to an article on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Eastern Europe’s website, went out of his way to show humility, arriving early and helping to clean up. Only later did he reveal he was a prince of Abu Dhabi.

As Zayed’s health failed in the late 1990s, his sons began to step into bigger roles—and to break away from his guidance by starting businesses of their own. It was around this time that Tahnoun started his first holding company, the Royal Group, the entity he would use to incubate the Hydra chess computer. He also started a robotics company that produced a humanoid robot, REEM-C, which in turn was named after an island in Abu Dhabi where he made a series of real estate investments.

When Zayed died in 2004, Tahnoun’s eldest brother, Kha-lifa, became the new ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE, and Mohamed, the eldest of the Bani Fatima, became the crown prince. The other sons took on an array of official titles, but their roles were more ambiguous.

As a reporter based in Abu Dhabi from 2008 to 2011, I fell into the pastime of “sheikh watching,” a Gulf-royal version of Kremlinology that involves reading between the lines of announcements and moves, and keeping in touch with palace insiders who occasionally betray a few secrets. At the time, Tahnoun seemed like a fascinating dilettante very far from actual power—he held no serious role in the government and seemed preoccupied with growing his fortune, dabbling in technology, and changing the skyline of Abu Dhabi.

That all changed when Tahnoun stepped up as the family member with the greatest knack for wielding a growing tool for nation-states: cyberespionage.

In July 2009, thousands of BlackBerry users across the UAE noticed their phones growing dangerously hot. The culprit was a supposed “performance update” pushed by Etisalat, the UAE’s largest telecom provider. In reality, it was spyware—an early experiment in mass surveillance that backfired spectacularly when BlackBerry’s parent company exposed the scheme.

I experienced this myself one day on a trip from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, bringing my BlackBerry to my ear and finding it so hot it nearly burned my face. It was my first direct, personal experience of the UAE’s hidden police state. But shades of its existence are apparent to anyone who has spent time in the Gulf States. Violent crime is nearly nonexistent, and life can be smooth, even luxurious. But in moments of stress or risk, these countries can become very dangerous places, especially for residents who dare hint at dissent.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring in 2011—which saw four Middle Eastern autocrats topple in the face of massive, Twitter-organized crowds—only heightened the UAE’s resolve to stamp out any green shoots of democracy. When a handful of Emirati activists made their own mild case for human rights and political reform in 2011, the state convicted them on charges of royal defamation. Then it promptly pardoned and released them into a life of surveillance and harassment.

While there’s no evidence that Tahnoun had any direct involvement in the BlackBerry debacle, he would soon come to oversee an empire capable of far more sophisticated spycraft. In 2013, he was named deputy national security adviser—around which time the UAE’s ambitions to spy on its residents and enemies started to reach an industrial scale.

For several years at that point, the UAE had been running a secret program known as Project Raven, formed in 2008 under a contract with consultant and former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. The US National Security Agency had blessed the arrangement, meant to give the UAE state-of-the-art surveillance and data analysis capabilities to contribute to the war on terror. But around 2014, Project Raven took a new tack. Under the new management of a US contractor called CyberPoint, it recruited dozens of former US intelligence operatives with a simple pitch: tax-free salaries, housing stipends, and a chance to fight terrorism.

But fighting terrorism was, in fact, only part of the agenda. Within two years, the project’s management changed hands yet again to a company called Dark-Matter, effectively an Emirati state-owned firm. Emirati intelligence leaders placed Project Raven under their own roof—just two floors from the UAE’s own version of the NSA. The message to Project Raven’s employees: Join DarkMatter or leave.

For those who remained, the job included tracking journalists, dissidents, and other perceived enemies of the state and the royal family. Among the key American operatives who stayed on with DarkMatter was Marc Baier, a veteran of the NSA’s elite Tailored Access Operations unit. Emails later showed Baier chatting with the Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, describing his UAE clients as “the most senior” and demanding white-glove service as he shopped for hacking tools. Other former NSA hackers on the Project Raven team got busy developing custom attacks for specific devices and accounts.

They got to human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor—one of the Emiratis who had blogged in favor of democratic reform during the Arab Spring—through his child’s baby monitor. It was 2016, and Mansoor had grown used to his devices behaving strangely: phones that grew mysteriously hot, suspicious text messages, drained bank accounts, according to a person familiar with his experiences. His phone had even once been infected with Pegasus spyware, a notorious product made by the Israeli cyber-arms firm NSO Group. But the baby monitor was new. Unknown to him, operatives at DarkMatter were using it to listen to his family’s private conversations.

In another project, DarkMatter assembled what it called a “tiger team”—a task force to install mass-surveillance hardware in public places. These probes would be capable of “intercepting, modifying, and diverting” nearby traffic on UAE’s cellular networks, according to an Italian security researcher who was being courted by DarkMatter in 2016. “To operate as we want them to, these probes are going to be put everywhere,” the prospective hire, Simone Margaritelli, was told in an email during his recruitment process.

And who was ultimately overseeing all this activity? In early 2016, Tahnoun had been named national security adviser, which placed him fully in charge of UAE intelligence. And there are signs that the ultimate controlling party over DarkMatter was none other than Tahnoun’s investment firm, the Royal Group.

Eventually, I may have become a target of the UAE’s hacking apparatus myself. In 2021 a coalition of journalists called the Pegasus Project informed me that my phone had been targeted by the UAE using Pegasus spyware in 2018. At the time I’d been reporting on a global financial scandal that implicated a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family—Sheikh Tahnoun’s brother, Mansour. The UAE denied that it had targeted many of the people identified, including me.

The hacking and tracking of American citizens would eventually become a red line for some of Project Raven’s former intelligence agents. “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting US persons,” a Project Raven whistleblower named Lori Stroud would tell Reuters in 2019. “I am officially the bad kind of spy.”

The ensuing scandal resulted in US federal charges for several of its ex-NSA leaders, including Baier. DarkMatter and Project Raven, meanwhile, were painstakingly broken down, scattered, rebranded, and then subsumed into other companies and government departments. Many of their pieces and personnel eventually moved under the umbrella of a single new entity founded in 2018—called G42.

G42 has denied publicly it had any connections to Dark-Matter, but the threads aren’t hard to see. One DarkMatter subsidiary, for instance, was an entity that worked especially closely with Chinese companies. Not only did it eventually appear to become part of G42, but the subsidiary’s CEO, Peng Xiao, went on to become the CEO of G42 itself.

A Chinese speaker who studied computer science at Hawaii Pacific University, Xiao’s past is otherwise a black box. Though he was a US citizen for a time, he eventually surrendered his US passport for UAE citizenship—an exceedingly rare honor for a non-Emirati. And under a subsidiary of G42 called Pax AI, Xiao helped produce the next evolutionary step in DarkMatter’s legacy.

One morning in 2019, millions of phones across the UAE lit up with a cheery notification. A new messaging app called ToTok promised what WhatsApp couldn’t—unrestricted calling in a country where the voice-calling function of most chat apps was blocked. Within weeks, it had shot to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app store even beyond the Emirates. But there was a catch. Each time someone tapped the app icon, the user gave the app access to everything on that phone—photos, messages, the camera, voice calls, location.

Data from millions of phones flowed to Pax AI. Like DarkMatter before it, Pax AI operated from the same building as the UAE’s intelligence agency. The ToTok app itself came from a collaboration with Chinese engineers. For a regime that had spent fortunes on NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware and DarkMatter’s hacking teams, ToTok was elegantly simple. People didn’t have to be laboriously targeted with spyware—they were eagerly downloading it.

Representatives of ToTok adamantly denied that their product was spyware, but an engineer who worked at G42 at the time told me that all of the voice, video, and text chats were analyzed by AI for what the government considered suspicious activity. (Among the easiest ways to get flagged: placing calls to Qatar, then a rival in a mutual cyberwar, from within the UAE.) G42 declined to comment on specific details for this story but responded to WIRED with an overall statement: “G42 is steadfast in its commitment to responsible innovation, ethical governance, and delivering transformative AI solutions globally.”

Inside G42, staff sometimes refer to Tahnoun as “Tiger,” and his orders can swiftly change the company’s course. One mandate from Tiger, according to a former engineer, was to build him either a business that generates $100 million in revenue a year or a technology that makes him famous. In the workplace, there is no mistaking that the conglomerate has one foot inside the security state: Most of the company’s technology and data centers are based in Zayed Military City, a restricted-access zone, and all G42 staff need to pass security clearances to get hired.

Through G42, government intelligence services, and other cybersecurity entities, Tahnoun had effectively come to oversee the UAE’s entire hacking apparatus. But at a certain point, control over the UAE’s spy sector and the industry around it wasn’t enough for Tahnoun.

By the turn of the decade, Tahnoun had ambitions for more political power over the whole of the Emirates. His sibling Mohamed had been serving as the de facto leader of the country since their brother President Kha-lifa suffered a major stroke in 2014. Now, as Khalifa’s health continued to fail and Mohamed’s formal accession to the throne was becoming imminent, the position of the next crown prince was up for grabs.

These moments of dynastic uncertainty can be dangerous. In Saudi Arabia, the sons of the country’s first king, Abdulaziz al-Saud, have taken the throne one after the other ever since the 1950s. By the time the current king, Salman, took power in 2015, he was 80 years old, and the ranks of potential heirs below him had become crowded, corrupt, and rife with internal tensions. That’s why, in 2017, King Salman’s son Mohammed, or MBS, struck out to eliminate his rivals—mostly cousins and their aides—by arresting them in a purge, asserting himself as the new strongman.

In Abu Dhabi, Tahnoun’s argument in the succession debate, according to royal insiders, was that his brother Mohamed should follow precedent and allow the sons of Zayed to rule while they were of good health and sound mind—a system that would place him in contention. But Mohamed was adamant that his own son Khalid should be crown prince, a signal to the country’s large youth population that they were represented high up in government.

Tahnoun argued his point for more than a year, even providing evidence that Mohamed’s plan contradicted their father’s request for succession. But in the end, the brothers worked out a deal. Tahnoun agreed to set aside his ambition to be the crown prince or ruler—in exchange for vast power over the country’s financial resources. It was this bargain that would ultimately put him in charge of $1.5 trillion in sovereign wealth.

In 2023, Tahnoun was made chairman of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the largest and most important sovereign wealth fund in the country. Khalid’s appointment as crown prince was announced weeks later.

Officially, Tahnoun got a modest bump in title to become deputy ruler along with his brother Hazza. But those dealing with Abu Dhabi over the past few years say the same thing: Tahnoun’s powers have increased by an extraordinary degree, and not just in finance. He has also taken over diplomacy with Iran, Qatar, and Israel, and even handled the United States for a time when relations with the Biden administration declined. “Whenever there’s a difficult file, it’s given to Tahnoun,” says Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a scholar of Gulf politics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. That skill has helped him “grow his power enormously,” Ulrichsen says.

As Tahnoun has gained access to new resources, he has plowed them into his maze of investments and conglomerates. Under the Royal Group, he controls not only G42 but also another conglomerate called the International Holding Company—itself a massive consortium that employs more than 50,000 people and owns everything from a Zambian copper mine to the St. Regis golf club and island resort in Abu Dhabi. He also oversees First Abu Dhabi Bank, which is the UAE’s largest lender, and another multibillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund called ADQ.

And now, with a growing position in the global AI arms race, Tahnoun’s empire also includes a stake in the future of humanity.

In December, the US government confirmed it had authorized the export of some Nvidia GPUs to the UAE—specifically to a Microsoft-operated facility inside the country. At G42, subsidiaries have kept multi-plying: Space42 focuses on using AI to analyze satellite imaging data; Core42 aims to build massive AI data centers across Abu Dhabi’s deserts.

Inside the US security establishment, many remain worried about the US tech sector’s increasingly close relationship with the UAE. One unsettling fact, according to a former security official, was that China made no protest over Tahnoun’s decision to tear out all of Huawei’s equipment and sever ties with the company in 2023. “They didn’t raise a peep,” the official told me. When Sweden banned Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from its 5G rollout in 2020, Beijing’s foreign ministry spoke out against it, and Swedish telecom giant Ericsson lost huge amounts of business in China in retaliation. By contrast, G42’s big breakup with China somehow got a pass—suggesting to the official that there may be some kind of backdoor understanding between the two nations.

In a statement to WIRED, US congressman Michael McCaul reiterated his concern that technology could leak to China through the UAE’s deal with Microsoft, and stressed the need for tighter guardrails. “Before advancing this partnership and others like it further, the US must first establish robust, legally binding protections that apply broadly to AI cooperation with the UAE,” he said.

But even if those guardrails were put into place, the UAE has a history of finding ways to do what it wants. I’m reminded of the briefings that executives from Israel’s NSO Group gave to journalists for a time in the early 2010s, assuring them that Pegasus spyware had safeguards against abuse—and that Pegasus clients (like the UAE) would be blocked from targeting US and UK phone numbers (like mine). And I’m reminded of the blessings that the NSA gave to Project Raven at its inception.

While Donald Trump and his new administration are expected to continue with export controls over GPU chips, the view from people inside Tahnoun’s orbit is that the new administration will likely be much more “flexible” about the UAE’s AI ambitions. Plus at least one Trumpworld insider has a vested interest in the relationship: The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have together contributed more than $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, guaranteeing the fund some $20 million to $30 million in annual management fees alone. Abu Dhabi’s leaders have consulted with Kushner and other Trump insiders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, on AI policy, according to people familiar with the discussions.

While the continued supply of GPUs could be a remaining source of leverage for the US, it could be a declining one as rival chips improve. Some analysts argue that, even now, export controls are not the source of strength that American officials think they are. “AI is not like nuclear power where you can restrict the materials,” says computer security expert Bruce Schneier. AI technology is already highly distributed, he says, and the idea that American companies are at a huge and absolute advantage is a mirage.

Now that Tahnoun has been “brought inside the tent”—and given a key and expanding role as an investor of choice for the current winners in the AI race—he has certainly succeeded in gaining some leverage of his own. And those who keep needing money from the UAE may be happy to see it gain more clout. At a World Government Summit last year, Sam Altman suggested that the UAE could even serve as the world’s “regulatory sandbox” for AI—a place where new rules for governing the technology can get written, tested, and advanced.

Meanwhile, the Middle East could be entering a period, like the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when rules are largely off the table. Now that rebels have taken over Syria from the regime of Bashar al Assad, the Gulf States—especially the UAE—will be anxious to increase surveillance to avoid any spread of Islamist unrest. “We’re going to see more repression, more use of surveillance technologies,” says Karen Young, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. And when it comes to managing threats and winning games of strategy, Tahnoun likes to make sure he’s playing with the most fearsome machine in the world.