NEWS
Saudi firms scale AI as governance challenges grow: Nutanix
Saudi Arabian organisations are accelerating Artificial
Intelligence adoption, but many face growing challenges around governance, infrastructure readiness and data sovereignty, according to Nutanix’ s eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index( ECI).
The report found that AI is reshaping enterprise IT strategies across the Kingdom, increasing demand for modern application architectures and container technologies. Over the next three years, 85 % of IT decision-makers expect application containerisation to increase, while 72 % said AI is already accelerating container adoption. Among organisations running AI-enabled applications, 82 % are building new applications in containers.
Despite rapid AI uptake, governance remains a significant concern. More than three-quarters( 77 %) of Saudi IT executives believe the use of AI tools outside official oversight creates business risk, while 65 % have encountered AI applications deployed by non-IT teams. In addition, 70 % said organisational silos between business and IT are limiting technology execution and overall performance.
The survey also highlighted the growing importance of data sovereignty. Nearly four in five respondents( 78 %) said it is a high priority when making infrastructure decisions, while 53 % prefer to keep infrastructure within the Kingdom because of security and data protection requirements. Public cloud remains the preferred environment for containerised applications, with 52 % hosting workloads there compared with 43 % on private cloud or onpremises infrastructure.
Talal Alsaif, Regional Director, Central Gulf at Nutanix, said organisations now need hybrid multicloud platforms that support AI, strengthen governance and ensure data sovereignty to unlock AI’ s full business potential.
Snowflake deepens AWS partnership with $ 6bn AI investment
Snowflake has expanded its strategic collaboration with
Amazon Web Services( AWS), committing US $ 6 billion over the next five years to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative and agentic AI.
The multi-year agreement will deepen product integration between the two companies while increasing joint investment in customer success, workload migrations and go-to-market initiatives. The announcement comes as Snowflake surpasses US $ 7 billion in lifetime sales through AWS Marketplace.
The investment, Snowflake’ s largest infrastructure commitment to date, will support growing demand for AI and data workloads running on AWS, with a particular focus on AWS Graviton-powered compute.
The partnership aims to help enterprises build and deploy AI-powered applications more quickly by bringing generative and agentic AI capabilities directly to governed enterprise data. Customers including Fetch and Hex are already using Snowflake on AWS to develop AI applications while maintaining security and governance.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, said enterprises are moving beyond AI experimentation towards deploying intelligent agents that can reason over trusted data, coordinate workflows and deliver measurable business outcomes. He said the expanded partnership with AWS would make it easier for organisations to bring AI to governed data while improving speed, operational efficiency and business impact.
Talal Alsaif, Regional Director, Central Gulf at Nutanix
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, said enterprises are increasingly deploying AI agents to drive tangible business outcomes. He added that Snowflake’ s expanded commitment to AWS Graviton would provide customers with the performance, flexibility and cost efficiency needed to run data warehousing and AI workloads at scale. •
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