Today's Edition
Khaled Al Khawaldeh (Abu Dhabi)
UAE telecom giant du, under the umbrella of the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) announced on Tuesday that it will deploy "Oracle Alloy" to offer sovereign AI and cloud services in the UAE.
The move comes as governments put increasing emphasis on retaining their sovereign control of AI using local infrastructure. At a signing ceremony on Tuesday during Dubai's AI Retreat, held under the patronage of H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Muhammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, du announced plans to become the first local cloud provider to offer a comprehensive set of cloud services, aimed at government and public entities.
"The ability to deploy AI services in a dedicated cloud region within our local data centre in the UAE is particularly valuable in helping our government customers accelerate their transformation initiatives from a facility within the UAE," said Fahad Al Hassawi, CEO of du.
Sovereign cloud services refer to cloud computing services that are provided and operated by entities within a particular country or jurisdiction, typically under the control of government or government-approved agencies.
The term "sovereign" emphasises the idea of independence and control over data and services within the boundaries of a nation.
The company plans to provide add over 100 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services in addition to its existing offerings. Released back in 2022, Oracle Alloy, is a cloud infrastructure platform is meant to give partners greater control over the commercial and customer experience, customising it to address their specific market needs, thus enhancing their ability to fulfil regulatory and sovereignty requirements.
Back in 2023, Microsoft and G42 announced plans to jointly offer sovereign cloud offerings through Azure as part of an effort to bolster their presence in the countries rapidly emerging AI sector.
The latest announcement by du will add steam to the sector and could indicate more localised data centre projects in the future. "With its strong customer network and local capabilities, du is well positioned to help the governments of Dubai and other Emirates harness the high performance, flexibility, security, and scalability offered by OCI," Nick Redshaw, Senior Vice President, Technology, and UAE country leader at Oracle said.
Du may also benefit from a recent collaboration between Oracle and Nvidia that will see it be able to offer Nvidia's GPU-as-a-Service to their public customers.
Back in February, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees at the World Government Summit in Dubai that every country would need to own the production of their own intelligence. "It codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data," Huang said during a fireside chat with the UAE's Minister of AI, HE Omar Al Olama. "It's not that costly, it is also not that hard … the first thing that I would do, of course, is I would codify the language, the data of your culture into your own large language model." During the chat, Al Olama agreed with Mr. Huang and further underscored the UAE's commitment to achieving the sovereignty and control he described.
"We completely subscribe to that vision…that's why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilising compute."
