Industry Findings: MEA’s performance is increasingly shaped by sovereign-cloud mandates and surging AI adoption across banking, energy, and public services (Oct-2023). Enterprises now prioritize providers capable of delivering secure, regionally distributed compute. A strong example is the wave of hyperscale DC projects across UAE, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa—creating new low-latency corridors and reducing the region’s historical dependence on European cloud hubs.
Industry Progression: A major progression signal emerged when Google Cloud announced its plan to launch a new cloud region in Saudi Arabia in Nov-2023. This deepens MEA’s AI and analytics capacity, boosts regional workload localization, and increases competitive pressure on established hyperscalers to accelerate infrastructure builds across the region.
Industry Player Insights: The MEA region’s infrastructure environment is driven by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Africa Data Centres. Africa Data Centres’ Oct-2023 expansion in Johannesburg added new high-density racks and improved regional redundancy, strengthening Africa’s multi-region compute fabric.