As Saudi Arabia marks 2026 as its ‘Year of AI,’ Bruno Morais, Vice President – Commercial, Saudi Arabia at Oracle, explains what it really takes to build a lasting AI economy,  from sovereign cloud to national skills programs to homegrown startups.

Not long ago, navigating an unfamiliar city without Google Maps or Waze felt normal. Today, it’s unthinkable, we check live traffic even for routes we know by heart.

I believe this analogy captures how enterprises will soon feel about AI. Once it’s woven into daily work, there’s no going back, and organizations will demand the same capability internally, but it must come with airtight security and proper governance to keep data in its own infrastructure. Any exposure is a vulnerability, and, as AI capability accelerates, the discipline protecting the data behind it must accelerate too.

Today, the global race for AI leadership is no longer about who develops the most powerful algorithms. It is about who creates the strongest foundations for AI to thrive.

That means investing in more than technology. It requires world-class digital infrastructure, trusted cloud platforms, skilled talent, and an innovation ecosystem where businesses can confidently adopt and scale AI.

Saudi Arabia understands this, and that investment is already happening at national scale.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) has committed more than $40 billion to AI-related ventures, building the backbone behind its growing AI economy.

The Kingdom also declared 2026 as the “Year of AI“, signalling that AI is not simply another technology trend – it is becoming a strategic pillar of economic transformation. Rather than treating AI as a standalone initiative, Saudi Arabia is embedding it into the very fabric of its Vision 2030 agenda, creating the conditions for an AI-native economy. According to the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), 66 of the Kingdom’s 96 Vision 2030 objectives are now directly or indirectly linked to data and AI.

This coordinated approach is already delivering results. Saudi Arabia has become one of the region’s fastest-growing AI markets, attracting billions of dollars in investment while accelerating AI adoption across government, finance, healthcare, education, and industry. Last year alone, Saudi companies secured $9.1 billion across 70 investment deals, while the number of AI companies operating in the Kingdom surpassed 600.

The state of AI deployment in Saudi Arabia is further highlighted in Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends 2026 report for Saudi Arabia, which found that AI tool usage among Saudi consumers rose from 49% to 66% in a single year, a shift the report describes as a genuine tipping point. What was an experiment a year ago is now a daily habit for two in three people.

These are encouraging figures, and the steady growth towards an AI economy hinges on several pillars. Long-term leadership depends on building three pillars simultaneously: infrastructure, talent, and innovation.

Building the infrastructure for trusted AI

As AI becomes embedded in mission-critical operations, infrastructure is becoming as important as intelligence itself.

For most organisations in the Kingdom, that choice is public cloud, and rightly so. It is where the majority of AI investment, innovation, and skills are concentrated today.

For a narrower set of workloads, typically in government or highly regulated sectors, data residency requirements call for an additional layer of control. Highly regulated industries can unlock AI’s full potential with a trusted cloud environment that protects sensitive information, complies with national regulations, and provides the performance required for large-scale AI workloads.

This is where sovereign cloud plays a specific, complementary role rather than a replacement for public cloud.

Saudi Arabia has recognized this early. The Kingdom continues to invest in cloud infrastructure that enables organizations to innovate with AI while ensuring data remains protected within national borders.

One example is stc’s deployment of Oracle Alloy, enabling one of the Middle East’s largest ICT providers to operate its own sovereign cloud entirely from local data centres. The deployment gives customers access to more than 200 Oracle Cloud services while ensuring compliance with Saudi Arabia’s data residency, cybersecurity, and regulatory requirements.

As the AI market matures, I’ve watched priorities shift based on my conversations with clients across the Kingdom. The main question has evolved from “what is AI” to “how do we govern it safely”. Having both public and sovereign options built on the same underlying platform allows organizations to meet that shift without having to choose one path for their entire estate.

AI leadership starts with people

Technology alone cannot create an AI economy.

Every successful AI deployment ultimately depends on people with the skills to design, implement, govern, and continuously improve intelligent systems.

Saudi Arabia has made talent development a national priority.

The Kingdom’s recently launched AI-powered National Skills Platform, led by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development, is an important step in modernizing workforce development. By using AI to personalize learning pathways and align training with labor market needs, the platform aims to equip more than three million people with future-ready skills in areas including AI, cybersecurity, healthcare, and retail.

This reflects an important shift in workforce development – from standardized education models to data-driven, personalized learning that evolves alongside the economy.

Industry also has a critical role to play.

Across the Kingdom, partnerships between government, universities, and technology companies are helping create multiple pathways into AI careers.

Oracle’s Mostaqbali program is one example, preparing 50,000 Saudi women, youth, and professionals for careers in AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and data analytics through structured learning pathways delivered by Oracle University.

More recently, Oracle expanded its partnership with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) to provide practical AI training to 10,000 students through the Smart Summer Seekers initiative.

Similarly, Red Sea Global and Oracle recently announced plans to train 5,000 Saudi nationals, equipping local talent with the digital skills needed to support one of the Kingdom’s most ambitious tourism and development projects.

These initiatives illustrate a broader national commitment: building a sustainable pipeline of AI talent that extends from classrooms to careers.

Turning AI capability into economic value

Infrastructure and talent create the conditions for innovation. Startups and entrepreneurs transform those conditions into economic growth.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 places innovation at the centre of economic diversification, with AI expected to become a catalyst for new industries, business models, and productivity gains across the economy.

The Kingdom is already seeing tangible outcomes.

One of the major players emerging in the Kingdom is Takween – a company incubated at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

With its mission to provide sovereign, enterprise-grade AI solutions for the Kingdom’s industrial and regulatory landscape, Takween needed a cloud partner that could support its sovereign infrastructure requirements and AI scalability ambitions. Takween chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as it builds Takween Cloud, enabling it to establish a sovereign AI cloud service backed by Oracle’s robust GPU architecture, high-bandwidth networking, low latency and strong security.

As more organizations adopt AI across customer experience, operations, supply chains, finance, and software development, these gains are likely to multiply across the wider economy.

The opportunity extends beyond individual companies. AI has the potential to improve public services, accelerate scientific research, strengthen healthcare systems, modernize manufacturing, and unlock entirely new sectors of economic activity.

Building an AI economy for the long term

The countries that lead the AI era will not necessarily be those that invent every breakthrough.

They will be the ones that create ecosystems capable of adopting AI at scale.

Saudi Arabia is taking a deliberate, long-term approach by investing simultaneously in cloud infrastructure, sovereign AI capabilities, digital skills, and innovation. Together, these investments create a reinforcing cycle: trusted infrastructure encourages adoption, skilled talent accelerates innovation, and successful innovation fuels further economic growth.

Maintaining this momentum will require continued collaboration between government, academia, and industry. It will also require fostering a culture that encourages experimentation, entrepreneurship, and responsible AI adoption.

Having led Oracle’s commercial business in the Kingdom through this transition, I see the “Year of AI” as more than a symbolic declaration. It is a strategic vision for the future, one where AI is not simply another technology, but the foundation of a more diversified, resilient, and globally competitive economy, and one directly tied, objective by objective, to Vision 2030 itself.

This approach has the potential not only to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s national ambitions, but also to establish the Kingdom as one of the world’s leading AI economies and a model for digital transformation across the region.

By Bruno Morais, Vice President – Commercial, Saudi Arabia, Oracle

Related post

View all