Aramco Digital and WWT form strategic AI infrastructure partnership
Aramco Digital and WWT form strategic AI infrastructure partnership
Deal promises to advance AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia
#Saudi #infrastructure - Aramco Digital, the national Saudi petroleum group’s new digital transformation arm, has announced a strategic partnership with World Wide Technology (WWT), a privately-held US technology services provider, to drive the advancement of AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. This is the second potentially big AI infrastructure deal made by Aramco Digital this year, following the partnership announced with US AI accelerator chip maker Groq at LEAP 2024 in Riyadh during March. On the other hand, is perhaps the biggest in a series of deals announced over the past year by WWT, which opened its first office in the region last year in Abu Dhabi.
SO WHAT? - In January 2023, the group launched Aramco Digital to reinforce Aramco's leadership position in energy industry AI, drive digital innovation across industries in Saudi Arabia and to help grow the Kingdom's digital economy via partnerships, projects, and joint ventures. This dramatically expands Aramco’s remit to drive digital transformation outside of the group and serve other national companies and government departments. Aramco Digital's partnerships, such as the one announced with World Wide Technology, will support its goals to harness AI to make a positive impact across the country.
Some key details related to this partnership agreement:
Aramco Digital and World Wide Technology (WWT) have formed a strategic partnership to drive the advancement of AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The agreement was announced following meetings between the companies' respective leadership teams in London last week.
The two companies expect the partnership to play a pivotal role in transforming Saudi industrial sectors, from energy through to healthcare, and to help drive sustainable economic growth in the Kingdom.
The partnership is also likely to be recognised as a milestone in WWT's expansion across the Middle East and in the EMEA region as a whole.
Aramco Digital already has a few existing AI infrastructure relationships in place, including a new partnership announced at LEAP24 in March with Groq, a US technology company that builds superfast processors for AI inference; and an existing agreement with all-in-one enterprise AI platform provider SambaNova.
ZOOM OUT - Saudi Aramco has ramped up its investment in artificial intelligence over the past few years, expanding both the number of areas that it uses AI and its capability to develop and deploy AI across the group. Aramco announced last year that it would invest $1.9 billion in digital technologies over 2023-2025, and the group has been hiring for AI and data science roles intensively over the past 18 months. In March, Aramco Digital revealed METABRAIN, the world's largest industrial large language model, built primarily for internal Aramco use. A 1 trillion parameter version of the LLM is expected to be ready by the end of this year. So, although one of Aramco’s core AI and digital transformation initiatives, it’s important to note that there is also a massive group-wide transformation taking place leveraging AI and Big Data.
IMO - The partnership between Aramco Digital and World Wide Technology could prove to be a powerful one. Aramco is a global leader in applying petroleum sector technology and has rapidly grown its in-house AI and data science capabilities. However, the group’s roots are clearly in the oil sector and not technology sector. So, WWT’s global experience in delivering infrastructure and digital services at scale, could prove to be a key ingredient in bringing Aramco’s considerable AI and digital expertise to market.
Read more about Aramco Digital:
World's largest industrial LLM revealed! (Middle East AI News)
Read more about World Wide Technology:
Open Innovation and WWT sign $100m partnership deal (Middle East AI News)