Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and Google Cloud, have announced a strategic partnership to create a new global Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub. The new AI hub will be based near Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.
The landmark partnership, which was signed at the Future Investment Initiative 8th Edition (FII8), aims to establish Saudi Arabia as a global hub and top AI destination for local and global enterprises and start-ups.
H.E. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of PIF, said, “This partnership demonstrates PIF’s dedication to fostering an AI-friendly environment through investments in human capital and technology, upskilling thousands with cutting-edge tools to support our sustainable and innovative infrastructure goals. Saudi Arabia is a prime location for global tech partners as PIF brings both sector expertise and a long-term approach to investment.”
Under the partnership, customers will be able to use Google Cloud’s technology to support growth across industries and increase capacity for the delivery of AI applications. Businesses and their end consumers can expect to benefit from better quality AI applications and data services, delivered faster locally.
Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet and Google, said, “This strategic partnership will accelerate adoption of AI in the local language and across industries — including healthcare, retail, financial services and more — for enterprises and startups in Saudi Arabia, across the Middle East, Africa and around the world. As part of Saudi Arabia’s rich technology ecosystem, we aim to create highly-skilled jobs for Saudis and opportunities for global businesses to fuel growth through cloud adoption.”
The partnership, which is subject to obtaining regulatory approvals, will feature joint research on Arabic language models as well as Saudi-specific AI applications. To advance Arabic-language models, PIF and Google Cloud will explore enhancing the Arabic-language capabilities of Gemini — Google’s generative AI model family — by combining additional Arabic datasets with Google Cloud’s technology. Local businesses, researchers and developers will have the opportunity to connect these models to their systems so they can build sophisticated Arabic language AI agents and applications.
Enabled by Google Cloud’s years of investment and leadership in custom silicon, the high-performance, purpose-built infrastructure will include the newest tensor processing unit (TPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators as well as the Vertex AI platform – Google Cloud’s specialized development platform that enables customers to build generative AI applications.
The partnership also aims to develop the Saudi workforce through AI programs for millions of students and professionals, supporting the national objective of growing the information and communication technology (ICT) sector by 50 percent.
Preliminary research commissioned by Google Cloud and conducted by Access Partnership, a global tech policy advisory firm, estimates the new AI hub could add a cumulative $71 billion in GDP to the Saudi economy over eight years. The increased economic activity from AI adoption in Saudi Arabia is expected to support the creation of thousands of highly skilled direct and indirect jobs.
The new investments build on Google’s Cloud’s existing presence in Saudi Arabia, which includes the Dammam cloud region, which launched last year and is part of Google Cloud’s current global network of 40 regions.