GITEX leaves the World Trade Centre after 45 years

GITEX GLOBAL leaves Dubai World Trade Centre, its home for 45 years, for the Dubai Exhibition Centre at Expo City Dubai. The 2026 edition runs December 7–11 — the summit day at DWTC on the 7th, the exhibition at Expo City from the 8th.
The new venue is around 1.5 times the size of the old one. The organisers put the expected 2026 scale at more than 200,000 attendees from over 180 countries, 6,800 exhibiting companies and 400+ government entities.
Gulfood moves to the same venue in 2026.
Two things change here for anyone planning around the show, and only one of them is the address. The October slot had been fixed long enough that half the region's product launches, funding announcements and hiring rounds were timed against it; moving to December pushes all of that into the last weeks of the financial year. The venue change is the smaller story — a bigger hall for a show that had outgrown its old one — but the calendar change is the one that quietly reshuffles a year of planning, and the attendance figures above are projections, not a count.
Source: Dubai Media Office checked against the source
More Dubai news

GITEX is a December show now
The show that owned Dubai's October for forty-five years now runs 7–11 December at Expo City. October's hotel week has lost its anchor tenant.

Apple's new CEO built the hardware
John Ternus became Apple's chief executive on 1 September after twenty-five years inside the building. The interesting part is not that Apple replaced its CEO. It is who it did not look for.

2,100 jobs, and no denominator
The Real Estate Empowerment Programme created more than 2,100 jobs for Emiratis in Dubai property between 2023 and 2026 — about fifty a month. The release gives no baseline to measure them against.