IBM deal with Saudi Arabia “brings a piece of HQ to KSA,” regional VP says

RIYADH: The latest IBM collaboration with the Saudi Data and AI Authority means a major part of the computing giant’s headquarters has made its way to Saudi Arabia, IBM’s regional vice president said.

“I am happy to share that the majority of the employees in there (software development lab) are actually Saudis that have already filed patents and those patents are already being used, and one of those products is Watsonx,” Ayman Al-Rashed told Arab News at the main hall of the Global AI Summit in Riyadh on Thursday.

AI was expected to contribute $135 billion to the Kingdom's economy by 2030, the equivalent of 12.5 percent of GDP, Al-Rashed said.

“That’s massive, and when you have that much impact, usually innovation is going to follow. So what we think is that you’re going to have a lot of breakthroughs. We believe that joint effort will accelerate the breakthrough.”

On Tuesday, SDAIA and IBM announced that the collaboration of their AI models ALLAM and Watsonx, respectively, was available on Deem, a government cloud-computing platform.

Deem is “software as a service” — such as email, file sharing, video meeting, and data rights management and infrastructure. It also serves as “infrastructure as a service” — such as virtual data center, backup, cloud storage and domain hosting.

Al-Rashed told Arab News that Watsonx, IBM’s commercial generative AI and scientific data platform based on cloud offering a studio, data store and governance toolkit, is being developed in Riyadh.

Allam, the AI generative platform serving Saudi Arabia and Arabic speakers around the world, was included in IBM’s Watsonx data platform at the IBM Think 2024 conference in its pilot phase as one of the best generative models in Arabic in the world.

He said that with this collaboration, IBM “wanted to bring a piece of the headquarters to KSA.”

Al-Rashed highlighted IBM’s plan to announce future projects at their “IBM Think” event next week.