Preprint
Essential medicines · GCC
Who Owns the Gulf's Medicine?
إنسولين الخليج في يد مورّد واحد تقريبًا… فماذا لو تأخرت الشحنة؟
Gulf Cooperation Council states import most of their medicines, but published local-production figures disagree because they rest on different definitions. This paper measures supplier-country concentration of medicine imports in all six GCC states, and compares the finished-product layer with the active pharmaceutical ingredient layer for tracer medicines from the 2025 WHO Model List of Essential Medicines. At heading level, GCC import dependence looks diversified; at tracer level it is concentrated, and for insulin it rests almost entirely on finished-product imports from one or two European suppliers.
Preprint
AI data centres · Supply concentration
Who Owns the Stack? — Gulf AI data-centre components
من يملك البنية التحتية؟ — مكوّنات مراكز بيانات الذكاء الاصطناعي في الخليج
The six GCC states have announced AI data-centre programmes; a 2026 Abha Foundation review puts them at about 12.8 GW in Saudi Arabia, 8.1 GW in the United Arab Emirates and 1.8 GW in Qatar. This paper builds a replicable, per-country indicator of import-supplier concentration for four critical component classes: compute and network equipment, high-voltage power equipment, cooling equipment, and water-treatment machinery used in desalination. In the 2023 preliminary sample, five of twenty-four reporter–class cells are highly concentrated and eight are moderately concentrated — bounds on the trade channel through which these components arrive, not ownership shares.
Preprint
Arabic health AI · Gulf dialects
Official-Source Health Information in MSA and Gulf Dialects
المعلومة الصحية من مصدر رسمي بالفصحى ولهجات الخليج
Arabic large language models are increasingly evaluated on medical content, but existing Arabic health benchmarks mostly draw on examination questions, translated English material or online forums, rarely use Gulf dialects in parallel with Modern Standard Arabic, and rarely involve pharmacists. This paper designs and pilots an evaluation set whose ground truth is public awareness content published by GCC ministries of health on diabetes, obesity, medicines use and fasting in Ramadan: 69 MSA question–answer items — 48 from nine Saudi Ministry of Health pages and 21 from two Omani ministry documents — with Saudi and Kuwaiti variants of every question. Two free AI models acting in a clinical-pharmacist role reviewed the items and a feasibility run; no human pharmacist or clinician reviewed either.
