Saudi Arabia launches tech initiatives to create more startups

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia has launched a couple of initiatives to enhance the kingdom’s global ranking in digital areas such as artificial intelligence, Arab News reported.

The announcement was made at an event called Launch held on Wednesday and hosted by the Saudi Federation for Cyber-security, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP), as well as the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), and the Saudi Federation for Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority.

The Saudi officials launched the initiatives at a conference in Riyadh. The first programme is called “Hima,” which aims at supporting innovation in enterprises with a value of SR2.5 billion, Minister of Communication and Information Technology Abdullah Al-Swaha said.

The minister also said the kingdom will be able to see more programmers in every 100,000 citizens as a way to measure the success of creating a capable workforce, a move that will be supported with the creation of many technical and digital academies in the kingdom with leading international partners.

Saudi Arabia aims at becoming one of the top 5 countries globally in AI, and this requires the creation of 25,000 specialist jobs in data science and AI before 2030, Abdullah Al-Ghamdi, head of the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, said.

Saudi Arabia will see significant growth in all major areas of digital technology from Internet of Things (IoT) to Cloud computing, increasing; thereby, the entire size of the information and communication technology sector to $27 billion by 2025, Mohammed Al-Tamimi, governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) told a forum in Riyadh.

Similarly, the IoT market size is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 26 per cent, while Cloud services are expected to make up to 30 per cent of the total ICT spend in the kingdom by 2030, he added.