Scale AI, a startup backed by Amazon, will open a new office in Saudi Arabia by the end of 2025.
The company aims to expand in the Middle East, where countries have committed over $100 billion to become leaders in artificial intelligence and digital technology.
Gulf nations attract tech giants by investing billions in AI and data
Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar want to diversify their economies and stop relying entirely on oil by investing over $100 billion into technology and AI.
These investments will support industries concerned with AI, data infrastructure, and digital startups with major projects like building large data centers, creating AI computing hubs, and funding early-stage tech companies with private and public sectors in mind.
The Gulf governments have requested big tech firms worldwide to open offices across the region and hire local talent to speed up this project, which will also help share knowledge, create jobs, and build a workforce skilled in tech.
Salesforce announced that it would invest $500 million in Saudi Arabia. It recently began hiring local talent after the Kingdom’s officials pressured foreign companies to build real operations as much as they sell their products.
Scale AI also joined the movement after announcing plans to set up an office in Riyadh by the end of 2025. The company’s Global Managing Director, Trevor Thompson, commented, “Outside of the US and China, I think this is really the fastest growing region for AI adoption.”
Scale AI eyes bigger valuation and partnerships in the Gulf
Scale AI has a global workforce of contract workers who manually process text, images, and video data for machine learning and has already made deals with Abu Dhabi and Qatar that would allow the company to clean and label data for training AI models like chatbots and autonomous vehicles.
The company raised $1 billion in funding in 2023. It pushed its valuation to $13.8 billion, which attracted support from tech giants like Amazon and Meta. Reports now claim that Scale AI is working on acquiring a tender from the Middle East that would almost double its valuation.
Expanding operations in Saudi Arabia and planning an office in the UAE will open the doors for Scale AI to create more partnerships with local governments, support new AI projects, and participate in building AI infrastructure in the Gulf.
Moving to the Middle East could also make the company more competitive outside North America and China by pooling more clients from regions where artificial intelligence is growing at an unprecedented pace.
Saudi Arabia partners with Google to build $10B AI hub
Saudi Arabia has already made significant strides in AI development, partnering with Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) to create a $10 billion AI hub to support the Kingdom’s tech industry and make it more competitive globally.
Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), leads the $100 billion project called Project Transcendence, and it is working with Google to make the region a top hub for AI development in the Middle East and the world.
This AI hub will build Arabic-language AI models to make artificial intelligence tools more accessible to Arabs and create high-tech data centers to process large amounts of data for training the models.
Saudi Arabia also aims to encourage its citizens to participate in tech and fill new jobs that the growing AI industry will create by investing heavily in education and research programs to develop local AI talent.
The partnership between Saudi Arabia and Google fits into the Kingdom’s national development plan, or Vision 2030, which aims to expand technology, tourism, and renewable energy industries.
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