Omar Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence of the United Arab Emirates. Photo credit: World Economic Forum / Sikarin Thanachaiary, under Creative Commons license

The government of the United Arab Emirates has thrown open the door for electric carmaker Tesla to join its push to accelerate self-driving technology over the next five years, as the Middle Eastern powerhouse seeks to boost its digital economy. The UAE’s government plans to itself gather and handout data that’ll be useful to autonomous driving cars to help attract related companies, according to Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Al Olama. Usually, such data costs money and significant time for self-driving companies to gather but getting it for free may very much incentivize them to head to the UAE. Tesla as well as its competitors are “welcome to come and start in Dubai,” Al Olama said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk notably said that the electric carmaker is positioned to develop technology that’ll make its vehicles fully capable of driving themselves. Tesla is “very close” to achieving the basic requirements of “level-five” autonomy, Elon Musk stipulated, although one can take into consideration previous similarly timed promises also by Musk that don’t seem to have materialized.