According to Bloomberg report, Tencent Holdings Ltd. is expanding its cloud business in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, anticipating that the region’s emphasis on developing companies like artificial intelligence will need considerable extra data storage investments.
In an interview in Riyadh, Tencent Senior Executive Vice President Dowson Tong stated that, while the company’s investments in the region are “still in this nascent stage,” they are expected to grow in the near future.
Saudi Arabia aspires to be an internet traffic hub, and cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Alibaba have made considerable inroads inside the nation in recent years.
“We are going to announce more throughout the year,” he said, declining to elaborate. We see a lot of promise in this sector, therefore we plan to increase our investment.
Alibaba and Saudi Telecom Co. collaborated to launch Alibaba Cloud last year, contributing $238 million to the development of cloud computing infrastructure. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Amazon revealed intentions to invest $5 billion in cloud storage infrastructure.
The largest internet provider in China plans to expand its storage capacity to serve both domestic and international users. Honor of Kings, the company’s most successful mobile game with over 100 million daily active players, now offers Arabic editions.
Tong stated that Tencent, one of the many Chinese corporations expanding in Saudi Arabia, would first focus on providing cloud storage to gaming and entertainment businesses.
Tencent will give processing power to AI applications in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are substantially invested in this subject, having constructed massive Arabic language models.
“AI is the buzzword here,” Tong explained, adding that the corporation was investing “very aggressively” in the subject. He also mentioned that several of its local clients are now using its data centers to develop AI models.
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