Riyadh — Saudi Arabia has launched a series of technology initiatives of over $1.2 billion (SR4 billion) to improve the digital skills of 100,000 Saudi youngsters by 2030.
The announcement was made at an event on Wednesday, hosted by the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP), the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), and the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA).
The event included several multinational corporations Amazon, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Informa, and Microsoft, that announced their partnership with the Kingdom to create hubs for tech startups.
Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Abdullah Al-Sawaha announced the first Saudi-made smart chip made for military, civil and commercial applications.
He revealed that these smart chips have a processing capability that is more than 60,000 times used in the human journey to the moon, smartphones, and giant companies, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Sixo, Oracle, and Alibaba use.
Saudi Arabia aims to have at least one programmer out of every 100 citizens in 2030.
Continuingly, Saudi Arabia is targeting the creation of 25,000 specialists’ jobs in data science and AI before 2030 and achieving the top 5 in AI globally.
Additionally, MCIT established the National Technology Development Program with SR2.5 billion to make the Kingdom the world’s leading technology country.
