Fanar Star

Fanar Star is the from-scratch 7B parameter Arabic-centric large language model at the heart of Fanar, Qatar's sovereign AI platform. Developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, it launched in December 2024 at the World Summit AI in Doha. It was trained on nearly one trillion clean Arabic, English, and code tokens.

Fanar Star sits alongside Fanar Prime (a 9B model continually trained from Gemma 2 9B) in a platform that adds Islamic-content RAG, recency RAG, dialect-aware speech recognition, and culturally tuned image generation. The project is explicitly framed as sovereign AI capacity for the Arab world, with benchmarks emphasizing cultural alignment and dialect handling.