Dubai's summer heat has produced some odd solutions, but few as literal as this one. Careem, the city's go-to app for rides, food and groceries, has spent the season selling giant blocks of ice that residents drop into their private swimming pools to cool the water down. Then a content creator pushed the idea to its limit.
Dubai-based YouTuber Mo Vlogs kicked things off by ordering every single ice block available on the app and posting about it on Instagram. Atlantis Aquaventure, the huge waterpark at the tip of the Palm Jumeirah, jumped into the comments with a tongue-in-cheek question: could Careem cool down its pool too? The catch is scale — Aquaventure holds roughly 23 million litres of water, which is not exactly the same job as chilling a villa pool.
That is where Farizon Auto came in. The vehicle manufacturer saw the exchange and offered to handle the logistics, dispatching a Farizon SV electric chiller van to the waterpark carrying a single 690kg block of ice. The stunt, completed last week, now stands as the heaviest order ever placed through Careem — a record previously held by, presumably, something considerably smaller than three-quarters of a tonne of frozen water.
The practical takeaway for anyone actually living in or visiting Dubai: yes, the giant ice blocks are a real thing you can order on the Careem app. They were added over the summer as a quirky answer to the months when outdoor pools feel more like baths. The app already covers rides, restaurant deliveries, groceries and payments, so a near-tonne of ice in an electric van is just the latest addition to an increasingly anything-goes catalogue.
As for whether 690kg of ice makes any measurable difference to 23 million litres of water — basic physics says no, but nobody involved seemed to mind. The whole thing started as an Instagram joke and ended with an electric van and a very large ice cube at one of Dubai's most photographed attractions.
Why does this matter to travellers? Mostly as a snapshot of how Dubai works: tech apps, luxury hotels and car brands collaborating on stunts that double as entertainment, with Atlantis Aquaventure at the centre. If you are heading to the Palm Jumeirah, the waterpark is one of the city's marquee attractions regardless of its water temperature, and the story is a fun bit of local colour to know before you go. And if you are renting a villa with a pool during the sweltering months, you now know the ice-block trick is genuinely available at the tap of a button.
