Oracle boosts Abu Dhabi investment fivefold on AI and cloud demand

Technology company is also planning to open a sovereign cloud region in Bahrain

Oracle has 11 cloud regions in the Middle East and Africa that are live, including in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Jeddah. AP

Oracle plans to significantly boost its investment in Abu Dhabi as it seeks to cater to the growing demand for artificial intelligence and cloud services in the UAE.

“To meet strong demand for Oracle Cloud in the UAE, we are making a 5X investment in the Abu Dhabi region,” Nick Redshaw, the company's senior vice president for technology cloud and UAE country leader, said on Wednesday.

Oracle operates two cloud regions in the UAE, in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The company, which is hosting Oracle CloudWorld in Dubai on Wednesday, did not disclose details about the amount being invested.

The adoption of AI and cloud services has continued to grow in the Middle East driven by government efforts to develop the future economy as well as a surge in young consumers and an evolving digital landscape.

This has given global cloud providers an incentive to expand in the region. Apart from Oracle, global companies including Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Alibaba Cloud have all opened cloud and data centres in the Middle East.

Last week, global private equity company KKR and Gulf Data Hub said they were teaming up to invest more than $5 billion to boost the Dubai company's data centre infrastructure in the Gulf. It will be KKR's first such investment in the region, with the company also acquiring a stake in GDH for an undisclosed amount.

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi's Khazna Data Centres is building a 100-megawatt data centre in Ajman. The site will be the company's biggest in the Emirates, and is expected to more than double capacity to 850MW by 2029 from about 360MW in 2024, chief executive Hassan Al Naqbi told The National last year.

Oracle has 11 cloud regions in the Middle East and Africa that are live, including in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Jeddah, Johannesburg and Jerusalem, with 14 more “that are coming online”. This includes public cloud regions and those operated by individual customers directly. It previously revealed plans to open one at Neom, the $500 billion high-tech megacity in Saudi Arabia, with the company confirming last year that it would come up “soon”. Globally, Oracle has 171 cloud regions.

A cloud region is a geographic area that is the location of a cloud data centre, which is a physical building that houses IT infrastructure used for running applications and related services, and for managing and storing associated data.

“There's plenty of people playing in this sphere … and we partner and we compete,” Mr Redshaw told The National.

“Five years ago would have been different. Now it's a huge market. It's co-operative or 'co-opetition', that we're all going to work together, and there will be areas where we compete. So that's the ecosystem that we're working in. The good news is there's huge demand, there's huge investment. Customers need the capability. So we all work together.”

Oracle is also teaming up with Beyon Solutions, part of the Bahraini technology company Beyon group, to open a sovereign cloud region in Bahrain to meet the growing demand for cloud, AI and application services.

“As governments and public sector organisations become increasingly dependent on cloud-based technologies for their operations, the concept of sovereign cloud capability is emerging as a critical pillar to ensure national security, data privacy, and digital sovereignty,” Mr Redshaw said.

Sovereign cloud capability refers to a country's ability to maintain control over its data by ensuring that cloud services are hosted within its borders and are subject to local laws and regulations.

“I don't think there's a government in the world who isn't concerned about protection of data, data residency and so on,” Mr Redshaw said.

“We see that everywhere, every customer, every government, is concerned about data security, cyber security and everything else. So do we see demand for that ability? Absolutely.”

In the UAE, telecoms provider du uses Oracle’s cloud Infrastructure to offer sovereign AI services to governments in Dubai and the Northern Emirates.

Oracle also said it will train and certify 350,000 people across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan in the most in-demand technologies to help meet demand for the Oracle Cloud in the Middle East.

The programme will be delivered as a digitally through Oracle MyLearn, Oracle University's training platform.