UAE Deepens AI and Smart Mobility Cooperation with China Through High-Level Guangdong Engagements

Senior UAE government delegations held a series of high-level meetings in Guangdong Province this week as part of AIM Talks China 2026, organised by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Trade, deepening institutional cooperation with Chinese technology companies and city governments in the fields of artificial intelligence, smart mobility, robotics, and digital infrastructure.

Two concurrent missions ran across the week. The Sharjah Government delegation, led by Sheikh Fahim Al Qasimi, Chairman of the Department of Government Relations, included the Director General of Sharjah Digital Department and the CEO of the Sharjah Investment and Development Authority, alongside senior representatives from BEEAH Group and the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce. Separately, UAE Ministry of Foreign Trade Undersecretary Fahad Al Gergawi led a delegation that met with the Mayor of Guangzhou and visited PCI Technology, one of China's leading companies in AI-powered smart city infrastructure and intelligent rail transit.

The Sharjah delegation held meetings in Shenzhen and Guangzhou that covered a broad range of sectors aligned with the emirate's development priorities. In artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, the delegation met with CloudWalk Technology, Sealien Robotics and UBTECH to explore advances in industrial AI and robotics sectors expected to play a growing role in productivity enhancement and advanced industry development. In smart mobility and new energy, discussions were held with BYD, WeRide and XPENG on electric vehicles, autonomous driving and sustainable mobility. A separate meeting with Huawei, the Shenzhen Urban Planning and Design Institute, and Shenzhen Smart City Technology Development Group covered digital infrastructure, smart urban planning and technology-enabled public services. As of June 2026, 851 Chinese companies operate in Sharjah, with bilateral trade between Sharjah and China reaching approximately AED 6.3 billion in 2025.

The AIM Talks mission led by Al Gergawi focused specifically on AI and smart mobility cooperation. A bilateral meeting with Guangzhou Mayor Sun Zhiyang highlighted the city's strategic focus on artificial intelligence, new energy, and the low altitude economy, and identified practical cooperation pathways in transport, smart mobility, finance, tourism and new energy. Al Gergawi emphasised the UAE's role as a regional hub through which Chinese companies can access Middle East and North Africa markets, and specifically encouraged PCI Technology to explore the opportunities in smart city and intelligent transport infrastructure in the UAE.

The combined significance of the two missions sits within a broader pattern that AWM has tracked throughout the first half of 2026: Gulf governments are moving beyond bilateral trade conversations with China toward sector-specific technology transfer discussions in AI, robotics and autonomous systems that have direct operational implications for their own digital infrastructure programmes. The Sharjah meetings with autonomous driving companies WeRide and XPENG, for instance, connect to the broader Gulf smart mobility agenda that includes autonomous public transport trials already under discussion in the UAE. The PCI Technology meeting on AI-powered intelligent rail transit connects to the UAE's expanding metro and transport infrastructure investment pipeline.

From a technology sovereignty perspective, the depth of engagement is also notable in the context of the US government's ongoing decisions about which countries get access to frontier American AI models. Gulf states are diversifying their AI technology relationships across both US and Chinese ecosystems simultaneously, a strategy that reflects the AI platform diversification logic that has strengthened materially over the past two weeks.