In Saudi Arabia, Big Oil Can Fuel Big Data
January 30th, 2021

Via The Wall Street Journal’s Emerging & Growth Markets Weekly (1.30.21), an interesting view on Saudi Arabia’s New Economy competitive positioning:

Amid a global economy convulsed by Covid-19, online services are rushing to seize opportunities in Saudi Arabia, Benoit Faucon reports. Warner Music is in talks to buy a stakein Rotana Music, the Arab world’s largest record label which is owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. And in recent weeks Google and Alibaba have signed cloud-server deals with oil giant Saudi Aramco and Saudi Telecoms respectively. 

The reason for the rush? About three-quarters of the Saudi population is connected to social media—one of the highest connectivity rates in the world—and the country’s vast fossil-fuel resources could also bring a competitive advantage in the digital economy. Cheap oil can generate the power needed to run giant data farms.

“Data centers are the oil of the Internet,” says Kacy Grine, chairman of Ares Holdings who advises advises foreign companies in the kingdom. “Saudi Arabia has the world’s lowest [oil] production cost…and could then offer the best financial conditions to foreign tech companies. It is a way to diversify from oil while still being an oil and energy-related business,” he adds.


This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2021 at 6:53 am and is filed under Saudi Arabia.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  Both comments and pings are currently closed. 

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Wildcats & Black Sheep is a personal interest blog dedicated to the identification and evaluation of maverick investment opportunities arising in frontier - and, what some may consider to be, “rogue” or “black sheep” - markets around the world.

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