Oracle on Tuesday announced the opening of its second public cloud region in Saudi Arabia to meet the rapidly growing demand for its AI and cloud services.
“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,” the US company said in a statement.
Center3 is the host partner for the new Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region.
As part of Oracle’s distributed cloud strategy and Oracle’s $1.5 billion investment to expand cloud infrastructure capabilities in the Kingdom, the new region will help boost Saudi Arabia’s AI economy, which is expected to reach $135.2 billion by 2030, the statement said.
The Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region joins the existing Oracle Cloud Jeddah Region and the planned Oracle Cloud Region in NEOM to extend Oracle’s footprint in Saudi Arabia, it added.
“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 Eng. Haytham Alohali, Deputy Minister of 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.”
For his part, Richard Smith, executive vice president and general manager in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle, said: “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.”
“As part of our wider investment in cloud capabilities in Saudi Arabia, the Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region will help accelerate adoption of cloud and AI technologies to boost innovation across all sectors of the Saudi economy, while helping organizations addressing local data hosting requirements,” he added.
