Saudi Arabia invests heavily in new technologies: Al-Jadaan

Saudi Arabia is spending “heavily” in developing artificial intelligence, augmented reality and data mining technologies to stand out as a technology hub in the Middle East by 2030, Yahoo Finance reported, citing finance minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan.

“A lot of technology companies are being targeted by Saudi today,” he said during a talk at the IMF/World Bank spring meetings in Washington on Saturday.

“Why? Because we think that’s the future, [and] because we want to use them to bring that expertise and know-how into Saudi Arabia and build and maintain our talent. We think that’s the future and we are investing in the future," he added.

Last month, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited the US, where he met the top tech leaders and signed agreements with companies such as Snap, Amazon, Google and Apple.

Al-Jadaan noted that “cybersecurity was a risk”, as he revealed the Kingdom was developing an entirely new entity to combat this threat.

“One challenge I would lose my sleep over is capacity. If there’s anything that would challenge us seriously, it’s not design, it’s not planning, it’s implementation. So far, we have been successful, but I would like to continue that success,” Al-Jadaan added.