Accenture has signed a six-year agreement with Amazon Web Services to help businesses and governments across the Middle East accelerate their shift to cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
It comes as Gulf nations are increasing investment in the infrastructure needed to support an AI-driven economy.
The agreement covers the modernisation of legacy technology, migration of critical workloads to the cloud, and deployment of AI across sectors including energy, financial services and government.
Accenture will establish a dedicated regional team of architects and delivery specialists, while customers will also receive support through AWS's Migration Acceleration Programme.
“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the Middle East,” said Imran Sayyed, managing director and AWS Business Group lead at Accenture Middle East and Africa, in a statement on Tuesday.
Gulf push
The agreement comes as Gulf countries pour billions of dollars into the data centres, chips and computing infrastructure needed to develop and run increasingly powerful AI systems.
The UAE is at the forefront of that push. Abu Dhabi is developing the 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus, which will include the 1GW Stargate UAE cluster. The first 200MW phase of Stargate is expected to be completed in the third quarter, making it one of the largest AI infrastructure projects being developed outside the US.
The wider 5GW campus is expected to cost more than $30 billion, with Stargate UAE bringing together G42, Khazna Data Centers, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is rapidly increasing its own capacity as it seeks to establish itself as another major global centre for AI computing.
Today, the kingdom's operational data centre capacity reached more than 467MW in the first quarter of this year, according to Saudi government figures, up from 68MW in 2021. More than $15 billion has been invested in data centres and digital infrastructure.
Greater capacity is also down the pipeline.
Humain, the Public Investment Fund-backed AI company launched last year, is targeting about 6GW of data centre capacity by 2034.
This week, the company announced that its AI infrastructure using AMD's Instinct MI355X graphics processors, Cisco networking technology was now live.
Humain, AMD and Cisco plan to begin deploying up to a further 250MW of AI infrastructure in 2027, with the first capacity expected online in the second half of that year. Their joint venture remains on track to deploy up to 1GW by 2030.
Humain and digital infrastructure company DataVolt also took steps this week on an AI data centre at Oxagon, Neom's industrial city on the Red Sea. The companies are jointly developing 100MW of a 360MW first phase, with the initial capacity expected to be available in 2028. The wider DataVolt campus is ultimately planned to reach 1.5GW.
Cloud resilience?
AWS is preparing to significantly increase its presence in the kingdom. Its first Saudi cloud infrastructure region is scheduled to launch in December, representing more than $5.3 billion in planned investment.
AWS and Humain also plan to make up to 50MW of capacity available in Saudi Arabia's first dedicated AI Zone by 2028, using AWS Trainium chips and Nvidia infrastructure.
This comes at a time when resilience of the region's cloud infrastructure has come under greater scrutiny.
In March, drone strikes damaged AWS data centre facilities in the UAE and Bahrain. The incidents highlighted the risks associated with concentrating critical digital infrastructure and the importance of redundancy as cloud and AI workloads grow.
