Investing in Dubai: world number one for creative-industry FDI projects, with 754 projects and 19,304 jobs in 2025
fDi Markets data shows Dubai attracted 754 new greenfield creative-industry projects in 2025, worth $3.76bn and creating 19,304 jobs, the top city out of 233 for the fourth year running. Separately, Al Maktoum airport is getting a 50km underground people mover. What both mean for rental demand.
Dubai's rental market is driven less by tourism than by people moving here for work. That makes foreign direct investment rankings more useful to a property buyer than they look. Every company that opens an office brings tenants with a known income. In August 2026, fDi Markets, the Financial Times' investment-tracking service, published its creative-industries data for 2025, and Dubai came first again.
The ranking
- 754 new greenfield projects in cultural and creative industries, first among 233 cities for the fourth consecutive year.
- $3.756bn of capital, second in the world by value.
- 19,304 new jobs.
- London, Singapore, Riyadh and Bengaluru followed.
The category is broad: advertising and PR, software and data processing, film, media and gaming, AI-driven creative technology, design and architecture, and entertainment. Most of it is office-based work paid above the city median. For landlords, that is exactly the tenant profile that fills studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms.
Where these tenants live
Creative business in Dubai clusters in a few free zones: Dubai Media City and Internet City by the Marina, Dubai Design District (d3) next to Business Bay, and Dubai Studio City and Dubai Production City in the south. Staff usually rent within 15–20 minutes of the office. Around d3 that means Business Bay and Al Jaddaf. Around Studio City and Production City it means Sports City, Motor City, JVC and Production City itself, a district we profile in Production City: built around one industry.
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Under its Cultural Strategy 2033, the city aims to attract more than 6,000 international creative professionals, more than double its cultural assets and raise the sector's share of GDP to 5.4%. That is an argument for districts near the media zones, rather than a general "Dubai is growing".
Al Maktoum airport: 50km of driverless trains
The other August announcement concerns the opposite end of the city. Dubai Aviation City Corporation awarded the automated people mover for the new Al Maktoum International Airport to a consortium of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Larsen & Toubro. The system will run about 50km entirely underground, with 9 stations and 165 driverless vehicles. By comparison, Dallas Fort Worth's Skylink, among the largest airport systems today, is about 8km long.
Construction is due to finish in December 2031, and the first phase of the airport is due in 2032. At full build-out Al Maktoum is designed for 260 million passengers a year. That is the core long-term case for Dubai South, and also its core risk: the district is being sold today, while the airport opens in about six years.
The takeaway
Both stories make the same point. Demand in Dubai follows jobs, and jobs are not spread evenly. An apartment near the media free zones has tenants today. An apartment in Dubai South is a bet on 2032 and should be underwritten with a margin for delay.
Buying to rent to media and tech staff? We can compare the districts around d3 and Studio City on rent and entry price, and model separately what a position in Dubai South actually depends on.
Video on this topic
The same subject on the English channel — each clip has a written version of its own.
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