• Next year, GDH is planning to expand into Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt and has its radar on India and Morocco.
• Hyperscalers are continuing to open and announce new availability zones in GCC.
• Cloud adoption is the new platform for most of the enterprises for cost reduction, agility, efficiency and innovation, IDC says.

Dubai: Dubai-based Gulf Data Hub, the largest colocation datacentre provider in the Middle East, is planning to open 10 more datacentres across the Middle East.

Speaking to TechChannel News in an exclusive interview, Tarek Al Ashram, Founder and CEO of Gulf Data Hub, said that they have a 12MW datacentre in Dubai and a 16MW datacentre in Saudi Arabia running currently.

“We plan to open a 12MW datacentre in Dubai and a 24MW facility in Abu Dhabi by September 2021. In Saudi Arabia, we are planning a 16MW facility in Jeddah and a 24MW in Riyadh and 16MW in Al Khobar,” he said.

Hyperscalers are continuing to open and announce new availability zones in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries as CIOs are accelerating their existing digital transformation efforts, even more, to meet new customer and operational agility needs.

This year, IBM opened two datacentres in the UAE while Oracle opened its cloud region in Dubai and a Saudi facility.

According to ResearchAndMarkets, the revenues from the Middle East datacentre market are expected to grow at an annual growth rate of close to three per cent during the period 2019-2025 to cross over $3.7 billion by 2025.

Digital transformation fuels demand

The increase in smart city initiatives, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, is expected to develop the demand for edge computing and edge datacentres among countries in GCC.

According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), GCC public cloud market (IaaS, SaaS and PaaS) is expected to grow from $956 million this year to $2.35 billion in 2024, at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent.

IaaS is expected to grow by about 33 per cent and SaaS by 24 per cent this year.

In the long run, IDC said that IaaS and PaaS are going to grow at a much faster pace as cloud adoption is the new platform for most of the enterprises for cost reduction, agility, efficiency and innovation.

GDH was UAE’s first Tier III certified carrier and vendor-neutral data centre facility set up in 2014.

GDH has signed a long-term deal with a major telco in the UAE for wholesale lease agreement in 2017 to lease the full capacity of its datacentre to provide services to private enterprises, government entities and cloud service providers.

Next year, GDH is planning to expand into Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt and has its radar on India and Morocco.

In Oman, Al Ashram said that GDH plans to have a 24MW datacentre, starting with 12MW in July and 24MW in Kuwait, starting with 12MW in July 2021.

In Egypt, the company plans 48MW (Alexandria and Cairo), with 24MW by July 2022.

“Our goal is to be the provider of the high-tech datacentre and I am looking at it in a bigger picture as an investor,” he said.

Related posts:

• Equinix opens fourth datacentre in MENA in Oman
• Du to open two new datacentres in UAE by first quarter of 2021
• SAP to invest in more datacentres across Middle East