The gaming authority of the United Arab Emirates just handed Wynn Resorts a second massive win in as many months. After awarding Wynn the first commercial casino license in the emirates in October, the head of the UAE’s General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority (GCGRA) said this week that the emirates won’t be holding the door open for other casino operators to flood into the nascent market anytime soon.

“The process has been moving very deliberately here,” Jim Murren, chairman of GCGRA, told attendees of the Skift Global Forum East 2024 on Wednesday. “The government has been very clear they want to have a state of the art, highly compliant, very rigorous regulatory regime to make sure this is going to be world class from a regulatory perspective. Nothing we are doing is going to rush that at all.”

Then Murren uttered what must have been music to Wynn CEO Craig Billings’ ears. “I think you will see other [casino] licenses over time, but we’re focused on the operators we have already licensed and the fact there will be a national lottery here, which we announced earlier this year as well.” Murren mused that other licenses will follow over the “next five to ten years.”

To be clear, the grand total of casino licenses awarded to date in the UAE is exactly one, and the Wynn Al Marjan Island has it. Set on a man-made barrier islet in the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, also known as RAK, the resort will include a glittering hotel tower with 1,500 high-end rooms and suites, private villas on the marina, 22 restaurants and lounges, a spa, a beach club, a 9-acre poolscape, a high-end shopping esplanade, multiple entertainment venues, and nightly state-of-the-art laser and light shows. The designs also include a gaming floor, though building began before Wynn had its a casino license.

Historically, first-to-market casino properties have ramped up very quickly in new markets. “It’s simple supply and demand,” says Chad Beynon, a senior analyst covering gaming, lodging and theaters for Macquarie Capital. “We always think about percentage of GDP or spend per household, and when there’s just no supply for people in a part of the world, there’s nowhere else to go.”

Beynon told Forbes last month that he thought Wynn had a five-year head start on rival casino operators in the UAE, a prediction that now looks rock solid.

Outside of Egypt and Lebanon, casinos are practically nonexistent in the Middle East, since majority Muslim countries tend to ban gambling. Wynn is building what’s known in the industry an “integrated resort,” meaning it offers gaming as well as a hotel, entertainment, shopping and a slew of other amenities.

A report released in June from CBRE Institutional Research estimated that the UAE has the potential to become an $8.5 billion gambling market, rivaling Las Vegas in gaming revenue and beating Singapore. The authors of the CBRE report were effusive about the Wynn Al Marjan Island, which they estimated would generate $1.4 billion in gross gaming revenues and $1.8 billion in net revenues annually, adding that they expected Wynn’s property to stabilize within three years. “However, it could be much quicker,” they wrote. “We have seen first-to-market properties like Marina Bay Sands and Sands Macao ramp much quicker given the historical lack of gaming supply in those markets.”

On Thursday, Wynn Resorts offered an update on the progress of its pet project. Construction on Wynn Al Marjan Island is progressing steadily, with a new story completed every week. Concrete is poured up to the 26th floor, with walls erected up to the 29th floor. The hotel tower, which will eventually rise to 1,000 feet, has gained 144 feet in 100 days. At this rate, they’re on track to top off the skyscraper in December 2025 and open the resort in the first quarter of 2027.

Good news for Wynn is bad news for MGM Resorts, whose CEO told a crowd in September at the Skift Global Forum that his company had also applied for a UAE casino license, theirs in Abu Dhabi. “The way it will work, the federal government, the Abu Dhabi government, will approve it,” Bill Hornbuckle said at the time.

Now Hornbuckle appears to have been jumping the gun, according to Murren, who coincidentally is the former chairman and CEO of MGM Resorts. Apparently, he isn’t playing favorites with the company he ran from 2008 to 2020.

“Bill used to work for me, so I’ll have to talk to Bill about that,” Murren told the Skift crowd on Wednesday, reportedly drawing laughs from the audience.