Saudi Arabia: MCIT looks towards massive data center expansion in Saudi Arabia

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) in Saudi Arabia has announced large-scale data center development plans across the country. Included within these plans is the building of a hyperscale data center. 

By 2030, it is expected that an injection of $18 billion will be made in this area and that data center developments will bring 1,300 megawatts of energy in the next nine years.

MCIT is currently developing business principles for this data center development in the region, and is working with Gulf Data Hub, Al Moammar Information Systems (MIS), and Saudi FAS Holding Company.

Speaking to the Saudi Gazette, Bassam Al Bassam, deputy minister for telecom and digital infrastructure at MCIT, said: “We are enabling local champions to play a bigger role in the coming phase of Saudi Vision 2030, to increase the growth of hyper-scale co-location capacity data centers needed to attract other digital investments, such as cloud service providers, gaming publishers, video streaming service operators and content delivery network (CDN) operators to localize their services inside the Kingdom.”