Luigi Di Maio, the EU’s Gulf envoy, said this week that both sides want the 24 October summit to cover security, the economy and artificial intelligence. Saudi Arabia, which hosts the gathering in Riyadh, has meanwhile offered non-repayable grants of up to SAR500,000, about $133,000, to cultural businesses that adopt AI. The scheme launched in August, and its first round of applications was due to close on 29 September, according to Middle East AI News.
Grants Reach Museums, Fashion and Film
The Cultural Development Fund will pay non-repayable grants to micro, small and medium-sized cultural enterprises that develop or adopt AI. Funding covers six areas, from heritage preservation and creative production to audience experiences and intellectual property, across sectors ranging from museums and architecture to fashion and culinary arts. Projects must also follow Saudi AI ethics principles covering fairness, safety, transparency, accountability and privacy.
Many governments aim their AI strategies first at finance, healthcare or logistics, whereas Riyadh is paying for adoption in fields usually treated as cultural policy. The programme sits inside the kingdom’s Year of AI, declared by the cabinet in March, and its Vision 2030 plan to reduce dependence on oil. The fund says it wants AI to open opportunities for investment and entrepreneurship, which makes the scheme closer to industrial policy than cultural subsidy.
Brussels Meets a More Technological Gulf
The second EU-GCC summit follows the first, held in Brussels in October 2024. A Commission spokesperson told Al-Eqtisadiah that digital infrastructure, including data centres, cloud services and cybersecurity, is already a pillar of the partnership. Bilateral goods trade reached €165.7 billion in 2025, which makes the EU the GCC’s second-largest trading partner. Fuels still account for more than 75 per cent of EU imports from the region, which explains the appetite for a broader agenda.
Talks on a free trade agreement have stalled for more than two decades. The Atlantic Council notes that flagship projects, including that deal and the India-Middle East-Europe corridor, have yet to move beyond political declarations. The Gulf offers capital, renewable-energy projects and data infrastructure, while the EU brings research institutions, industrial technology and a large regulated market. After the 2024 summit, the Arab Reform Initiative judged that the meeting delivered optics rather than a specific breakthrough.
Small Grants Test Large Ambitions
Saudi Arabia’s larger AI ambitions dwarf a grant scheme for cultural firms.
The Saudi Press Agency reports that AI companies secured $9.1 billion in funding and that government spending on emerging technologies rose more than 56 per cent in 2024. Yet small grants may reveal more about how Riyadh expects the technology to spread, since AI changes an economy only when firms outside the technology sector use it.
Cultural AI raises unresolved questions about copyright, authenticity and jobs, and automated systems can flatten the local traditions they are meant to keep alive. The programme lists intellectual property as a funding area, yet that does not answer who owns work produced by models trained on local archives. Grants can buy adoption quickly, but a culture that outsources its curation to machines will end up exporting nothing distinctive.
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