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CTOnews.com, February 6 (Reuters)-Oracle plans to invest $1.5 billion (currently about 10.185 billion yuan) in Saudi Arabia in the next few years to expand its cloud footprint in Saudi Arabia and open its third public cloud area in Riyadh, according to Reuters.

The growing demand for cloud computing has prompted technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, a unit of Alphabet, to set up data centers around the world to speed up data transmission.

Saudi officials have pushed international companies to invest in Saudi Arabia and relocate their regional headquarters to Riyadh to benefit from government contracts.

"We are finalizing the opening plan for the Riyadh area," Oracle Senior Vice President Nick Redshaw said in an interview in Dubai. "until we announce the actual date, we are still working with suppliers."

Nick Redshaw said the investment would be completed within a few years, but did not provide details. Oracle will also expand its cloud capacity in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which it first opened in 2020, he added.

Although Oracle lags behind its bigger competitors in the competition for the cloud computing market, it was one of the first large technology companies to open data centres in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in economic transformation to achieve its vision for 2030. But Saudi Arabia has struggled to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), one of the pillars of the 2030 vision to diversify its economy away from oil.

In the first half of 2022, foreign direct investment was slightly less than $4.1 billion (currently about 27.839 billion yuan), a fraction of the ambitious target of $100 billion (currently about 679 billion yuan) set at the end of the decade.

While Oracle has been working with the government, Saudi Arabia prefers to encourage foreign companies to set up headquarters in the country, or risk losing government contracts and require them to comply by the end of 2023.

"We are working closely with the Saudi government to finalize the plans requested by the regional headquarters, and we will announce them when we finalize them," Nick Redshaw said.

CTOnews.com learned that Oracle also won a contract for the Saudi Crown Prince's $500 billion (currently about 3.4 trillion yuan) flagship NEOM project, a futuristic mega-city and economic zone that the Saudi crown prince is building along the Red Sea.

"NEOM is one of our largest cloud computing power consumption projects in Saudi Arabia," Nick Redshaw said.

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