Oracle Corp plans to invest US$1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia in the coming years as it builds up its cloud footprint in the kingdom and opens its third public cloud region in Riyadh, a company official said.
Increased demand for cloud computing has pushed technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google to set up data centers across the world to speed up data transfer.
Saudi officials have pressed international companies to invest in the kingdom and move their regional headquarters to Riyadh to benefit from government contracts.
Photo: Bloomberg
“We are finalizing the plans for opening the Riyadh region. We are still working with our suppliers before we can announce the actual date,” Oracle senior vice president Nick Redshaw said.
The investment would be made over several years, Redshaw said, adding that Oracle would also expand the capacity of its cloud region in Jeddah, which the company opened in 2020.
The company made the announcement as global tech companies gathered for a major tech conference in the Saudi capital.
Alhough Oracle lags behind its bigger rivals in the race to corner the cloud computing market, it was among the first large tech companies to open a data center in Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom has devoted hundreds of billions of US dollars toward an economic transformation, known as Vision 2030, led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
However, it has struggled to attract foreign direct investment, one of the pillars of Vision 2030, which aims at diversifying the economy away from oil.
Foreign direct investment reached just under US$4.1 billion in the first half of last year, a fraction of the ambitious US$100 billion target set for the end of this decade.
While Oracle has been working with the government, Saudi Arabia has been trying to encourage foreign firms to set up headquarters in the country or risk losing out on government contracts — deals that would be available until the end of this year.
“We are working closely with the Saudi government to finalize plans for that regional headquarters requirement, and we will announce them as we finalize that with them,” Redshaw said.
Oracle has also won contracts from the crown prince’s US$500 billion flagship NEOM project, a futuristic megacity and economic zone that is being built on the Red Sea coast.
NEOM is one of Oracle’s largest consumers of cloud capability in Saudi Arabia, Redshaw said.
WASHINGTON’S INCENTIVES: The CHIPS Act set aside US$39 billion in direct grants to persuade the world’s top semiconductor companies to make chips on US soil The US plans to award more than US$6 billion to Samsung Electronics Co, helping the chipmaker expand beyond a project in Texas it has already announced, people familiar with the matter said. The money from the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act would be one of several major awards that the US Department of Commerce is expected to announce in the coming weeks, including a grant of more than US$5 billion to Samsung’s rival, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), people familiar with the plans said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the official announcements. The federal funding for
HIGH DEMAND: The firm has strong capabilities of providing key components including liquid cooling technology needed for AI servers, chairman Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday revised its revenue outlook for this year to “significant” growth from a “neutral” view forecast five months ago, due to strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) servers from cloud service providers. Hon Hai, a major assembler of iPhones that is also known as Foxconn, expects AI server revenues to soar more than 40 percent annually this year, chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) told investors. The robust growth would uplift revenue contribution from AI servers to 40 percent of the company’s overall server revenue this year, from 30 percent last year, Liu said. In the three-year period
LONG HAUL: Largan Energy Materials’ TNO-based lithium-ion batteries are expected to charge in five minutes and last about 20 years, far surpassing conventional technology Largan Precision Co (大立光) has formed a joint venture with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院) to produce fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile electronics and electric storage units, the camera lens supplier for Apple Inc’s iPhones said yesterday. Largan Energy Materials Co (萬溢能源材料), established in January, is developing high-energy, fast-charging, long-life lithium-ion batteries using titanium niobium oxide (TNO) anodes, it said. TNO-based batteries can be fully charged in five minutes and have a lifespan of 20 years, a major advantage over the two to four hours of charging time needed for conventional graphite-anode-based batteries, Largan said in a
Taiwan is one of the first countries to benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, but because that is largely down to a single company it also represents a risk, former Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng (簡立峰) said at an AI forum in Taipei yesterday. Speaking at the forum on how generative AI can generate possibilities for all walks of life, Chien said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) — currently among the world’s 10 most-valuable companies due to continued optimism about AI — ensures Taiwan is one of the economies to benefit most from AI. “This is because AI is