Saudi Arabia is targeting to develop more than 1,300 megawatts of data centre capacity in the kingdom by 2030 at a total investment of $18 billion, the state-owned Saudi Press Agency said.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) is working closely with the private sector as well as local and international investors on an investment framework for large-scale data centre development in the kingdom.
This includes the development of hyper-scale data centres that can accommodate the high demand for cloud services and enable Saudi Arabia to become a computing powerhouse and the digital hub for the region, the report said.
Local companies working with MCIT include Gulf Data Hub, Al Moammar Information Systems, and Saudi FAS Holding Company.
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The report, quoting Bassam Al Bassam, Deputy Minister for Telecom and Digital Infrastructure at MCIT, said the government wants local champions to play a bigger role within Saudi Vision 2030 to grow hyper-scale co-location capacity data centres to attract other digital investments such as cloud service providers, gaming publishers, video streaming service operators and content delivery network (CDN) operators to localise their services inside the kingdom
To stimulate the development of the country’s digital infrastructure, the Saudi government has also launched a nationwide initiative to connect 3.5 million households by FTTH, extend wireless broadband networks to 70 percent of the rural households and cover more than 74 cities with 5G technology. In 2018, the government launched the first neutral Internet Exchange Point in Saudi Arabia.
