The world’s top producer of AI chips, Nvidia, is entering the Middle East and North Africa with its recent partnership with Ooredoo, the largest telecom company in Qatar.
Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom, confirmed the partnership and expansion in a statement on Sunday.
The telecom company has announced that its data centres in Qatar, Algeria, Tunisia, Oman, Kuwait, and the Maldives will now provide Nvidia’s AI and HPC GPUs.
Ooredoo now has a major competitive advantage when it comes to implementing generative AI applications because they are the only firm in the region to provide such services to its customers.
The partnership’s conditions were not made public, but it represents Nvidia’s first significant regional expansion and gives governments and local companies direct access to the company’s in-demand AI and graphics processing technologies.
The CEO of Ooredoo, Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, emphasised that this deal will give their business clients access to services that their rivals might not have for an additional 18 to 24 months.
Unfortunately, neither the deal’s value nor the GPUs that Nvidia would deliver to its Middle Eastern partners are known.
The United States limits access to the most cutting-edge semiconductors but permits the export of some Nvidia technologies to the Middle East.
“By providing NVIDIA’s full-stack AI computing platform to customers, Ooredoo will help make it easier for their customers to deploy generative AI applications and services,” Vasishta stated.
Ooredoo just stated that it will depend on availability and client needs, without mentioning which Nvidia GPUs will be used.
According to Fakhroo, Ooredoo intends to nearly treble its present 40-megawatt capacity by the end of the decade and is investing $1 billion to increase it by an additional 20 to 25 megawatts.
“Implementing NVIDIA’s full-stack platform for accelerated computing and generative AI, Ooredoo is equipped to be at the forefront of the AI revolution in MENA, driving digitalisation and innovation as the leading digital infrastructure provider in the region,” Fakhroo said.
We earlier reported that Cisco has established an all-in-one AI data centre solution co-developed with Nvidia that gives startups the server, storage, networking hardware, and AI software they need to implement generative AI and other AI applications on its platform.
