Tencent Holdings Ltd. is seeking to grow its cloud business in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as part of a wager that the Middle East’s concentration on emerging industries like artificial intelligence will necessitate significant new expenditures in data storage.
Senior Executive Vice President Dowson Tong of Tencent stated in an interview in Riyadh that while the company’s investments in the area are “still in this nascent stage,” they are expected to go up soon.
He declined to provide any further information, saying, “We are going to announce more throughout the year. We plan to increase our investment in this market as we see a lot of potential.”
Cloud companies such as Amazon Web Services and Alibaba have made major advances in Saudi Arabia over the past several years as the country aims to become a internet traffic hub.
Alibaba and Saudi Telecom Co. collaborated to introduce Alibaba Cloud last year, allocating $238 million towards the construction of cloud computing infrastructure. on the interim, earlier this year, Amazon revealed intentions to invest $5 billion on cloud storage infrastructure.
According to Tong, Tencent, one of several Chinese corporations expanding in Saudi Arabia, would first concentrate on providing cloud storage to gaming and entertainment businesses.
The largest internet operator in China plans to build out storage for its expanding activities in the nation as well as for global clients. Honor of Kings, one of its most played mobile games with over 100 million daily active gamers, has been released in Arabic.
Tencent’s Middle East offering will include processing capacity for AI applications, an area in which Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are making significant investments, including creating huge language models for Arabic.
“AI is the buzzword here,” Tong stated, noting that the business was making “very aggressive” investments in the area. He also mentioned that several of its clients in the area are already training AI models in its data centers.
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