Industry Findings: National industrial strategy and large cloud-region commitments altered procurement risk models and memory sourcing preferences. A clear policy and capacity inflection occurred in Mar-2024 when major cloud providers publicly announced plans to establish onshore cloud regions, prompting government agencies and large enterprises to require localised data-handling and lower-latency compute. Procurement teams shifted toward memory architectures that prioritise on-node capacity, verified endurance for persistent tiers, and clear qualification pathways to meet sovereignty and performance requirements for AI deployments.
Industry Player Insights: Companies shaping sector outcomes in UAE include Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology, SK hynix, and Kioxia etc. Amazon Web Services declared plans to open a Saudi cloud region in Mar-2024 and to invest in local data-centre capacity, accelerating demand for high-bandwidth HBM and enterprise SSD sampling among local integrators. Separately, Saudi government agencies and national AI authorities continued to refine national data-and-AI strategy guidance through 2024–2025 to accelerate domestic compute projects, which in turn prompted vendors to offer targeted validation programmes for memory and storage stacks. Those vendor developments compressed qualification timelines and expanded the set of locally available, validated memory options.