Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University launched Fanar 2.0 at the opening of World Summit AI Qatar on 9 December 2025.
What was announced
- The main model grows from 9 billion to 27 billion parameters.
- The platform covers text, image generation, speech to text, text to speech and audio understanding, and includes a model for Arabic poetry.
- It is available through APIs and a chat interface.
- QCRI said Fanar 3.0 is planned for December 2026.
Our take
For Arabic chat, voice and document products, a model built in Qatar is now worth putting through the same evaluation as the global models. We pick models per task by testing them on real questions, and an Arabic-first option belongs on that list.