Oracle Corp has said that it plans to open a dara center in Saudi Arabia and invest $1.5 billion in the region.
With this development, Oracle in the coming years is looking to expand its cloud footprint in the Kingdom. This new data center will be the third public cloud region in Riyadh, according to a company official, which Reuters reported.
“We are finalising the plans for opening the Riyadh region. We are still working with our suppliers before we can announce the actual date,” Nick Redshaw, a senior vice president at Oracle, said in an interview from Dubai.
Redshaw said the investment will be made over several years without providing detail. He added that Oracle would also expand the capacity of its cloud region in Jeddah, which the company first opened in 2020.
Saudi’s knowledge economy push
Saudi Arabia, in its Vision 2030 effort has earmarked billions of dollars for an economic transformation push, led by its ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Oracle has also won contracts from the crown prince’s $500 billion flagship NEOM project, a futuristic mega city and economic zone which the crown prince is building on the Red Sea coast.
“We are working closely with the Saudi government to finalise plans for that regional headquarter requirement and we will announce them as we finalise that with them,” Redshaw said in the Reuters report.
In August last year, Saudi-headquartered Quantum Switch Tamasuk (QST) is constructing the first phase of a 300MW data center project for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT).
Additionally, the plan entails building 60MW of data center capacity every year until 2026.
