NEOM is looking to seafood as it eyes a sustainable and self-sufficient future of food production in Saudi Arabia. NEOM is teaming up with the Arabian Agricultural Services Company (ARASCO) and Cargill to develop sustainable aquaculture sector and achieve protein self-sufficiency by 2030. The three parties will work together to explore and scale up sustainable ways to meet rising domestic demand for aquaculture, including through research and development into more sustainable feed sources.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has grand plans for a luxury travel destination set to be 33 times the size of New York City when completed. Sindalah Island – opening in 2024 – could be more extensive than Disneyland, while the octagon-shaped city OXAGON could be the world’s largest floating structure.

TONOMUS, the cognitive multinational subsidiary of NEOM, has announced the launch of its second venture startup competition at LEAP23 in Riyadh.  Led by the firm’s TONOMUS Venture Studio, the competition started on Feb. 6, and is titled “The Next Billion.” It is an initiative that invites participants to consider new technologies and innovations that a billion people in the world would require for energy, food and mobility.

A quick video update on progress so far from NEOM.

NEOM has taken a giant step towards its AI-driven future after announcing a collaboration with tech partners Oracle and NVIDIA on the sidelines of the LEAP23 event in Riyadh. Through its tech subsidiary TONOMOUS, Saudi Arabia’s NEOM will deliver ground-breaking AI across the development. TONOMOUS was the first company to be established as a full-fledged subsidiary of NEOM.

The availability of the globally adopted NVIDIA AI platform will grant businesses that make NEOM their home the benefits of essential processing engines for each step of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment.

The venture will be propelled by technology such as the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU and the upcoming, NVIDIA H100 – the most advanced accelerator ever produced and an order-of-magnitude leap for accelerated computing.

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The initiative invites participants to explore new technologies and innovations needed by an additional billion people to drive growth in industries such as energy, food, and mobility.  The competition aims to find ideas and ventures from various sectors that can help create cognitive cities, personalised solutions and make the best use of limited resources.

The budget has soared by 70% to $8.5bn for the NEOM green hydrogen mega-project that will tap massive green power capacity, a financial update from co-developer Air Products reveals.  Inflation, spare parts, upfront fees for land and $1bn of interest on loans have all contributed to the $3.5bn budget increase, said the US industrial gases company, which is developing the project in the desert of northwest Saudi Arabia with partners ACWA Power, the Saudi renewables developer, and NEOM.

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources on Tuesday issued the first industrial license to NEOM Green Hydrogen Co. at OXAGON, the Saudi Press Agency reported.  It is an equal joint venture between NEOM, ACWA Power, and Air Products.