Oracle expands cloud infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, boosting the Kingdom’s AI and Digital Economy

The new public cloud region in Riyadh is Oracle’s second cloud region in Saudi Arabia and part of Oracle’s US $1.5 billion investment to boost the country’s cloud capacity in line with Saudi Vision 2030

To meet the rapidly growing demand for its AI and cloud services, Oracle announced the opening of its second public cloud region in Saudi Arabia. The new Riyadh cloud region will help public and private sector organizations migrate all types of workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), giving them access to a wide range of cloud services to modernize their applications and innovate with data, analytics, and AI.

Located in Riyadh, the new cloud region will be part of a planned USD 1.5 billion investment from Oracle to expand cloud infrastructure capabilities in the Kingdom. 

The new region in Riyadh will join Oracle’s existing cloud region in Jeddah and a planned Oracle cloud region in the new city of NEOM. Oracle will also expand the capacity of the Jeddah region, which opened in 2020.

“The opening of Oracle’s new cloud region in Riyadh reflects the Kingdom’s continuous efforts in boosting the digital economy based on modern technologies and innovation,” said His Excellency Eng. Haytham Alohali, vice minister, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. “This step will significantly enable international and local companies to achieve innovation and promote the adoption of AI and cloud computing technologies in various sectors, which enhances Saudi Arabia’s competitiveness at the regional and international level.”

“With the rapid expansion of our cloud footprint in Saudi Arabia, Oracle is committed to helping the country achieve its goal of developing one of the strongest digital economies in the world,” said Richard Smith, executive vice president and general manager, EMEA Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle. “As part of our wider investment in cloud capabilities in Saudi Arabia, the Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region will help accelerate the adoption of cloud and AI technologies to boost innovation across all sectors of the Saudi economy, while helping organizations address local data hosting requirements.”

Oracle Cloud has seen stellar growth over the past few years in the Middle East with several hundred new cloud services and features rolled out. It is continuing to see organisations from across the region turn to Oracle Cloud to run their most mission-critical workloads in the cloud.

The company’s SVP for Technology Software, Middle East, Africa, Turkey and Levant, Cherian Varghese, said the investment in the third data centre is due to ongoing demand and in preparation for the region’s future growth. 

“Oracle has been the only adaptor of cloud in the Kingdom. We set up our first data centre in Jeddah before and then NEOM, so we already have two data centres in the Kingdom,” said Varghese. “Now we invested 1.5 billion dollars for our third data centre in Riyadh. This means we are going to expand our Jeddah region more because Saudi Arabia is moving in a big way to digital transformation and the cloud update is good so no matter what capacity we are putting in, we are getting more demand for future growth as well.”