If one edition deserves to be remembered as the moment GITEX stopped being a technology exhibition and became a summit of the world economy, it is 2024. Held from 14 to 18 October 2024 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, with Expand North Star running in parallel at Dubai Harbour, the 44th GITEX GLOBAL was organised under a theme that said it plainly: “Global Collaboration to Forge a Future AI Economy.” The world showed up to do exactly that.
The largest international gathering in the show’s history
The headline numbers set records for global reach. The 2024 edition brought together more than 6,500 exhibitors, 1,800 startups and 1,200 investors from over 180 countries — the highest international participation GITEX had ever recorded, with total attendance around the 200,000 mark. International participation surged by some 40 percent, and Europe arrived in force: more than 35 European countries took part, the strongest European showing to date, while Singapore, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Austria and Ireland debuted national participations.
Governments were everywhere — hundreds of public entities presenting digital programmes — and the conference programme ran to thousands of speakers across stages devoted to investment, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data centres and the technologies of the next decade.
The AI economy, negotiated in public
What set 2024 apart was the deal-making. On the exhibition floor and in the summit rooms, the business of the AI era was being transacted at national scale. The UAE’s e& signed a US$1 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services to accelerate cloud and AI services across the region. Core42, the G42 company, announced a strategic partnership with AMD to speed AI and cloud deployment in the UAE. Microsoft used the show to underline research projecting that it and its partners would generate tens of billions of dollars in new revenue for the UAE economy over the following four years.
China’s technology sector made its weight felt too, with more than 260 Chinese companies exhibiting — and one of them, XPENG AEROHT, once again stealing the visual honours with its land-air flying car, drawing crowds of visitors and dignitaries alike. Few images summarised GITEX 2024 better: the future, quite literally, hovering in front of you while a minister takes a photograph.
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Startups, honours and a widening map
Expand North Star, hosted by the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy at Dubai Harbour from 13 to 17 October, confirmed its status as one of the world’s great startup marketplaces, with 1,800 startups meeting the 1,200-strong investor contingent. Amid the global crowd, there was a notable honour for South Asia: Pakistan was recognised as the “Tech Destination of the Year” at GITEX GLOBAL 2024, a nod to the country’s fast-growing technology exports and startup scene.
The map widened further during the week with the announcement of GITEX Asia, the brand’s new Singapore edition — which would open at Marina Bay Sands in April 2025 — following the path already cut by GITEX Africa in Marrakech. GITEX was becoming a franchise of global tech capitals, with Dubai as its headquarters and its proof of concept.
Beyond AI: the widening agenda
For all the AI dominance, the 2024 programme deliberately ranged wider. Dedicated spotlights covered the future of health, digital cities, education technology, the energy transition and Web 3.0 — a recognition that the platform’s job is to convene whole industries, not a single trend. More than 400 startups from the Expand North Star community alone presented in areas from AI and Web3 to climate tech and gaming, and world leaders in technology and business debated the global digital transformation across the week’s stages.
The calendar around the flagship kept expanding too. GITEX Africa returned to Marrakech in May 2024 for its second edition, and preparations advanced for GITEX Europe’s Berlin debut the following spring. The Dubai edition remained the sun around which the others orbited — the week when the other continents’ editions were announced, promoted and fed with partnerships signed in the Trade Centre halls.
Why 180 countries matter
It is worth pausing on that figure — 180 countries — because it explains what GITEX had become by 2024. A trade fair draws an industry; 180 countries is the attendance profile of a United Nations of technology: ministers and regulators, sovereign investors, telecom chiefs, founders and the press of five continents, all in one venue in the same week. For exhibitors, that density is the product — a year’s worth of markets reachable in five days of corridors. For Dubai, it is the strategy made visible: position the city as the neutral, efficient meeting ground where the world’s technology business gets introduced to itself. The 2024 edition, the largest international gathering in the show’s 43-year history to that point, was the clearest demonstration yet that the strategy works.
What GITEX 2024 meant for Dubai
The 2024 edition crystallised Dubai’s pitch to the world: not merely a place to exhibit technology, but a place where the AI economy’s alliances are formed — where a telecom giant can sign a billion-dollar cloud pact, a flying car can find its first market, and 180 countries’ worth of founders, ministers and investors can meet in one week. The “Future AI Economy” theme could have been a slogan. In Dubai, it read more like an agenda.
The edition also set the trajectory for what followed: an even larger 2025, a brand staging editions on three continents, and a flagship preparing to leave its birthplace for a bigger home. In the long view, 2024 was the year the future AI economy stopped being a theme and became the show’s — and the city’s — operating agenda.
For the full arc from a one-hall computer fair in 1981 to the world’s largest tech show, read our history of GITEX.
Part of the DXB Talk GITEX archive: The History of GITEX
