Oracle Opens Second Cloud Region in Saudi Arabia

Oracle has opened its second public cloud region in Saudi Arabia, located in Riyadh. This expansion is part of Oracle’s $1.5 billion investment to enhance cloud infrastructure capabilities in the kingdom.^[1]  

The new Riyadh cloud region will allow both public and private sector organizations to migrate various workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It offers a range of cloud services aimed at modernizing applications and supporting innovation in data, analytics, and AI.

Center3 will serve as the host partner for the Oracle Cloud Riyadh Region. This new facility complements the existing Oracle Cloud Jeddah Region and the planned Oracle Cloud Region in NEOM, expanding Oracle’s presence in Saudi Arabia.

Oracle’s cloud services include Oracle Autonomous Database, HeatWave MySQL Database Service, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI Generative AI service, OCI AI Infrastructure, and OCI Supercluster.

The addition of the Riyadh region provides customers and partners with low-latency access to cloud services, improved business continuity through high availability, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities, and compliance with local data hosting regulations. OCI’s sovereign AI capabilities also offer better control over data and computing infrastructure to meet digital sovereignty requirements.

Oracle’s cloud architecture supports the deployment of public cloud regions and the establishment of dedicated cloud services within customer data centers, ensuring consistent performance and global pricing while meeting various market needs.

In March, it was reported that the Saudi Arabian government aims to boost its artificial intelligence sector with a proposed $40 billion investment fund.

The fund, expected to kick off in the latter half of 2024, aims to support various AI-related ventures, including startups focusing on chip manufacturing and data centers.