Silicon Valley tech firm doubles Saudi team on AI demand

US data infrastructure firm NetApp has doubled its frontline sales and engineering teams in Saudi Arabia. The company is wagering on the Kingdom’s shift from digital transformation to AI, positioning Riyadh as a regional hub for its Middle East and Africa operations. The expansion builds on NetApp’s decision to establish its Middle East and Africa headquarters in Riyadh in 2024, after operating in Saudi Arabia since 2007. The company has also expanded its local professional services and customer success teams.

How much are we talking? NetApp has doubled its Saudi sales team to six people from three, while its solutions engineering team has grown to four from two, Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for Middle East and Africa Walid Issa told EnterpriseAM on the sidelines of Leap.

AI is driving the push: Saudi Arabia’s rapid buildout of AI infrastructure is creating demand for the less glamorous layer beneath it, the systems that store, manage, protect, and prepare the enormous volumes of data AI models need to operate. NetApp is targeting government entities and companies building AI and sovereign cloud capabilities as part of that spending cycle.

“Saudi has been moving rapidly from digital transformation to AI transformation,” Issa tells us. “Success depends on having a trusted data foundation.”

And NetApp wants to follow the cloud money. The company says its technology is integrated with the major global cloud providers expanding in the Kingdom, allowing customers to manage data across their own data centers and public cloud infrastructure, including Google Cloud’s Dammam presence.

“We are the native intelligent data infrastructure in the three major hyperscalers. When they open in any country, we open with them,” Saudi Arabia Country Director Saeed Alzahrani tells EnterpriseAM.

NetApp is particularly targeting data-heavy industries, including oil and gas, banking, defense, and security, where keeping sensitive information secure while making it usable for AI has become an increasingly important part of technology spending. NetApp’s Saudi business has been expanding rapidly, although the company did not provide revenue or bookings figures that would allow the growth to be independently quantified.

“We have been growing by 2x so far, and we are continuing to grow even more,” Alzahrani says. The company isn’t putting a firm number on where that growth goes next. Issa floated growth of around 30% y-o-y when asked about the outlook, but stressed that the figure was an off-the-cuff estimate rather than official guidance.