Every long-running show has a hinge year — the edition where its future direction becomes unmistakable. For GITEX, that year was 2023. The 43rd edition, held from 16 to 20 October 2023 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, was opened in person by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai — and from the moment he toured the stands of Huawei, Microsoft, G42, Salesforce and IBM, one subject dominated every hall, every stage and every conversation: artificial intelligence.
Two venues, 41 halls, one enormous week
The first thing to understand about GITEX 2023 is that it no longer fit in one place. The main show filled the Dubai World Trade Centre to capacity with 6,000 exhibitors and more than 180,000 tech executives from 180 countries. Its startup sibling — rebranded Expand North Star and hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy — moved across the city to a spectacular new home at Dubai Harbour, running from 15 to 18 October. Together the two events covered 41 halls and 2.7 million square feet of exhibition space, a 40 percent increase on the year before.
The Harbour move mattered symbolically as well as logistically. North Star had begun in 2016 as GITEX Future Stars, a startup corner of the main show. By 2023 it was the largest startup event in the world in its own right, hosting 1,800 startups and 1,000 investors from 70 countries with a trillion dollars under management — a startup city by the sea, plugged directly into the main show’s gravity.
The year of AI, in every hall
ChatGPT had been released eleven months earlier, and GITEX 2023 was the first edition staged entirely inside the generative-AI era. Some 3,500 exhibitors presented AI-infused products. AI Everything, the show’s dedicated AI showcase and summit, returned at its largest scale, and the Global DevSlam developer gathering ran alongside it.
The home team made headlines of its own. The Technology Innovation Institute, the applied-research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, showcased Falcon 180B — at the time the world’s most powerful open-source large language model — a statement that the UAE intended to build AI, not just buy it. G42 exhibited under the theme “Imagination in Action,” while global giants treated Dubai as a launch market: Microsoft arrived fresh from its US$10 billion investment in OpenAI, and Salesforce, Broadcom, Beyon and Deloitte all chose 2023 for their GITEX debuts. More than 250 government entities, the highest public-sector involvement in the show’s history, presented digital-city visions alongside them. Across 21 conference tracks, more than 1,500 speakers delivered some 900 hours of content.
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GITEX goes global
The other headline of 2023 was geographic. In May and June that year, the brand had staged its first overseas edition — GITEX Africa in Marrakech, Morocco, inaugurated by Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch and independently rated the world’s best tech-event launch. Then, on 18 October, mid-show in Dubai, came the next announcement: GITEX Europe, to debut in Berlin in May 2025, organised by DWTC’s international arm KAOUN International with Messe Berlin. A fair born in one Dubai hall was now exporting itself to two other continents.
“Imagine AI Everything”
The edition even had a mission statement for a theme — “Imagine AI Everything” — and the startup competitions at its heart showed what the slogan meant in practice. At Dubai Harbour, Expand North Star hosted the Supernova Challenge, billed as the world’s largest startup pitch competition, where early-stage companies from every continent pitched for investment in front of the 1,000-strong investor contingent. Between the pillar event at the Trade Centre and the startup city at the Harbour, GITEX 2023 functioned as two world-class events fused into one week — a structure no rival show had attempted at this scale.
That fusion is perhaps the edition’s real legacy. Large technology fairs everywhere were asking, in 2023, how to stay relevant in an age of virtual launches. Dubai’s answer was to make the physical week irreplaceable at both ends of the industry at once: the ministerial summit and the garage startup, the trillion-dollar investor and the first-time founder, all within the same five days and the same city.
The Harbour experiment
The boldest operational gamble of 2023 was moving the startup show out of the Trade Centre entirely. Expand North Star’s relocation to Dubai Harbour — a waterfront district of marinas and cruise terminals — could have fragmented the week. Instead it clarified it. The Harbour edition, hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, gained room to grow into the world’s largest startup event, while the Trade Centre halls breathed just enough to absorb the AI surge. The experiment also proved the GITEX model could stretch across a city rather than a single building — a lesson the organisers would remember when, two years later, they announced the flagship’s own move to Expo City. In hindsight, 2023 was the rehearsal for the show’s city-scale future.
What GITEX 2023 meant for Dubai
GITEX 2023 confirmed two things at once: that Dubai had built the world’s indispensable meeting point for the AI era, and that the model was strong enough to franchise. The Ruler of Dubai walking the floor was more than ceremony — it was the city’s leadership inspecting, in person, the industry on which so much of its economic future now rests.
Read the whole journey in our history of GITEX, from the one-hall Gulf Computer Exhibition of 1981 to today’s global network of shows.
Part of the DXB Talk GITEX archive: The History of GITEX
