Fanar

Fanar (Arabic for 'lighthouse') launched in December 2024 as Qatar's sovereign generative AI platform, developed entirely at Hamad Bin Khalifa University's Qatar Computing Research Institute with sponsorship from Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. At its heart are Fanar Star, a 7B model trained from scratch on nearly a trillion Arabic, English, and code tokens, and Fanar Prime, a 9B model continually trained on Gemma-2 9B.

The platform adds Islamic RAG for religious prompts, recency RAG for post-cutoff events, bilingual dialect-aware speech recognition, and culturally grounded voice and image generation. Fanar 2.0 followed with a 27B instruct model and multimodal extensions, released under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face.