Saudi Telecom Co (STC), the biggest telecommunications company in the Middle East, will invest 1.5 billion riyals ($400 million) “to build the largest cloud-enabled data center in the region as the oil rich-kingdom seeks to become a center for digitalization,” Bloomberg reports, citing a spokesman for the company.
STC is implementing the third phase of its data-center program with a facility that has an allocated land area of more than 180,000 square meters (1.9 million square feet), according to a statement carried by Bloomberg. STC completed the first phase of the project in 2019 and the second phase is already is in the final commissioning stage. STC’s data-centers program consists of 16 data centers in six cities.
STC is majority owned by the PIF.
Last month, Saudi Arabia said it plans to create special economic zones offering incentives to invest in sectors including health care, manufacturing and cloud computing, with final details of such zones pending approval.
STC is majority owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF).
“We have big plans for our data centers to become a gateway for the MENA infrastructure,” Chief Technology Officer Haithem Alfaraj said in the statement. “STC is geared up to grow-on-demand.”
The Saudi Arabia cloud computing market is expected to generate a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.5% between 2021-2030, according to QuantAlign Research.
Earlier this month, the PIF said it was reportedly weighing a deal to combine the mobile phone infrastructure of Saudi Telecom Co. and Zain Saudi Arabia in a merger that would form the kingdom’s largest cellular towers company.
