Global Indians of the UAE is back, and the second installment, “The Next Tech Generation,” makes a very specific claim through 15 Indian-origin technology leaders building future-facing businesses from inside the Emirates. The through-line is the UAE as a launchpad, but the hard part is proving it is more than branding. Div Turakhia, founder of Ai.tech, is the opening act of that argument, and he says the UAE has what AI needs to win: energy, compute, capital, and political will.

Turakhia’s case is personal and fast-moving. He began coding at eight because he wanted to beat video games, and by the time he was 13 or 14, companies were asking him to help solve internet problems, with the teenager sitting across from senior executives. He frames his whole career as a lesson in leverage, then drills the execution point: in technology, he says, age and titles matter less than clarity of thought and solving the problem. That mindset propelled a trajectory described in the series as reaching $1 million at 18, $100 million at 23, and billionaire status in his early 30s. The key detail is how he interprets those milestones. He does not treat them as financial triumphs, but as stages of learning, including discipline without outside capital (businesses had to pay for themselves from day one) and the shift from building a product to building a company with systems, teams, repeatable processes, and the ability to decide with incomplete information.

So what does that have to do with the UAE? Turakhia ties it directly to ecosystem mechanics. He says recognition in 2017 as the youngest self-made Gulf billionaire reflected teams and the strength of an ecosystem, and he specifically argues that Dubai’s frameworks for global technology companies are part of the advantage. He reinforces this in meetings with UAE leaders, including His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, where he says the question from the top was what Dubai and the UAE can do to further growth for him and for the ecosystem. His conclusion is blunt: the UAE does not merely celebrate entrepreneurs after they succeed, it creates conditions for them to think bigger. And his next bet is artificial intelligence. Ai.tech is headquartered in the UAE, and he is putting his own capital and time behind the conviction that the country can become one of the world’s major AI hubs.

Then comes the series’ bigger strategic theme: AI is not just a product to ship, it is a platform to deploy, and deployment is where the real moat shows up. Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception (an A G42 company), describes UAE technology leadership through the question “what does this solve, and for whom?” He maps that across his career, from connecting people who lacked reliable internet to building infrastructure a region runs on, and then applying computing power to clinical problems at G42 Healthcare. Koshy argues the UAE’s shift from adopting technology to building its own AI and digital platforms was not accidental. He points to long-term strategic moves, including appointing the world’s first Minister of AI and establishing MBZUAI before artificial intelligence became a global conversation. The implication is a governance-and-research runway: foundations for world-class research, sovereign infrastructure, and a policy environment where pilots can move into production.

At Inception, Koshy says the work is sovereign AI deployments for governments and enterprises. He emphasizes a practical difference that boards and exec teams should care about: whether AI becomes indispensable depends on being built for the region’s language, context, and governance. He also flags the next scaling challenge, because governments do not buy lab demos. The next big opportunity, he believes, comes from AI as a horizontal layer across government, healthcare, education, finance, industry, and manufacturing. But the real challenge is scaling responsibly, with trust, data sovereignty, and governance built into the architecture from the start.

If Turakhia is the AI bullish case and Koshy is the deployment playbook, the series widens the lens to how the UAE is becoming a market and capital infrastructure hub for future technologies. Sunidhi Pasan, founder and group CEO of Finstreet Limited, is building financial market infrastructure from Abu Dhabi focused on tokenised and prediction markets. Her stated vision is to unlock liquidity, modernise ownership, and enable the digital transformation of financial and real-world assets, with work spanning sports, entertainment, energy, and AI infrastructure to turn trends and critical industries into intelligent market ecosystems. She positions her approach as regulated innovation, grounded by an MSc in Law and Finance from the University of Oxford and a background as a qualified lawyer, aiming for more efficient, transparent, and globally connected markets.

And for investors tracking the next phase of Web3 infrastructure, the series includes Vineet Budki, managing partner and CEO of Sigma Capital. He argues that more than 300 investments across the digital-asset space are not 300 separate bets, but “one thesis applied 300 times.” His focus, as described, is infrastructure that defines the next phase of Web3, backing companies including Mysten Labs, TON, Peaq Network, Solana, Humanity Protocol, Casper Labs, and Acurast. Budki’s framing is particularly relevant for executives because it draws a line between hype narratives and the underlying systems that applications rely on. He says, “We don’t back narratives. We back teams building infrastructure the system will eventually be wired through.”

Taken together, “The Next Tech Generation” reads like a playbook for why the UAE matters to global Indian-origin builders: the pitch is not only that startups can start there, but that the ecosystem is set up to turn ideas into deployed systems and, crucially, into markets. For boards, founders, and investors watching where AI and digital-asset infrastructure will land first, the question is no longer just “where can we build?” It becomes “where can we deploy responsibly, scale with governance, and connect products to real liquidity and real institutions?” The series’ answer, using Turakhia and Koshy as anchors, is that the UAE is positioning itself to handle the messy middle. Not the demo. The middle.