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Oracle to invest $1.5bn in Saudi Arabia, open data centre in Riyadh

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Oracle to invest $1.5bn in Saudi Arabia, open data centre in Riyadh

Oracle Corp plans to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia in the coming years as it builds up its cloud footprint in the kingdom and opens its third public cloud region in Riyadh, a company official said.

Increased demand for cloud computing has pushed technology companies such as Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet’s Google to set up data centres across the world to speed up data transfer.

Saudi officials have pressed international companies to invest in the kingdom and move their regional headquarters to Riyadh in order to benefit from government contracts.

“We are finalising the plans for opening the Riyadh region. We are still working with our suppliers before we can announce the actual date,” Nick Redshaw, a senior vice president at Oracle, said in an interview from Dubai.

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Redshaw said the investment will be made over several years without providing detail. He added that Oracle would also expand the capacity of its cloud region in Jeddah, which the company first opened in 2020.

The company made the announcement as global tech companies gathered for a major tech conference in the Saudi capital.

Though Oracle lags its bigger rivals in the race to corner the cloud computing market, it was among the first large tech companies to open a data centre in Saudi Arabia.

The kingdom has been devoted hundreds of billions of dollars to an economic transformation, known as Vision 2030, led by its de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

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But it has struggled to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), one of the pillars of Vision 2030, which aims at diversifying the economy away from oil.

FDI reached just under $4.1 billion in the first half of 2022, a fraction of the ambitious $100 billion target set for the end of this decade.

While Oracle has been working with the government, Saudi Arabia has been trying to encourage foreign firms to set up headquarters in the country or risk losing out on government contracts and has given them until the end of 2023 to comply.

“We are working closely with the Saudi government to finalise plans for that regional headquarter requirement and we will announce them as we finalise that with them,” Redshaw said.

Oracle has also won contracts from the crown prince’s $500 billion flagship NEOM project, a futuristic mega city and economic zone which the crown prince is building on the Red Sea coast.

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Apple CEO says looking into possibility of building manufacturing facility in Indonesia

Apple CEO says looking into possibility of building manufacturing facility in Indonesia

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Apple CEO says looking into possibility of building manufacturing facility in Indonesia

Apple Inc will look into the possibility of building a manufacturing facility in Indonesia, its CEO said on Wednesday after meeting President Joko Widodo.

Apple CEO Tim Cook arrived in Jakarta on Tuesday, after visiting Vietnam. He met with Jokowi, as the president popularly known, and will be inaugurating an academy for Apple developers on the island of Bali.

“We talked about the president’s desire to see manufacturing in the country, and it is something that we will look at,” Cook told reporters after the meeting. 

Apple has based much of its key manufacturing of iPads, AirPods and Apple Watches in Vietnam and suppliers for MacBooks are also investing in the country.

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Apple has no manufacturing facilities in Indonesia but has established four Apple Developer Academies.

Indonesia has a huge tech-savvy population, making the Southeast Asian nation a key target market for tech-related investment.

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TikTok quizzed by EU on TikTok Lite launch in France, Spain

TikTok quizzed by EU on TikTok Lite launch in France, Spain

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TikTok quizzed by EU on TikTok Lite launch in France, Spain

ByteDance’s TikTok has been given 24 hours to provide a risk assessment on its new app TikTok Lite launched this month in France and Spain on concerns of its potential impact on children and users’ mental health, the European Commission said on Wednesday.

The move by EU industry chief Thierry Breton under EU tech rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) comes two months after he opened an investigation into TikTok over possible DSA breaches. 

The landmark DSA requires companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover for violations.

The Commission on Wednesday said it had sent a request for information to TikTok, asking for more details on the risk assessment the social media company should have done before deploying TikTok Lite in the 27-country European Union.

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“This concerns the potential impact of the new ‘Task and Reward Lite’ programme on the protection of minors, as well as on the mental health of users, in particular in relation to the potential stimulation of addictive behaviour,” the EU executive said in a document seen by Reuters.

“TikTok must provide the risk assessment for TikTok Lite in 24 hours and the other requested information by 26 April 2024, after which the Commission will analyse TikTok’s reply, and then assess next steps.”

The Commission also asked for details on measures the company has put in place to mitigate systemic risks.

TikTok Lite, an app with a new functionality aimed at users aged 18+, was launched in France and Spain this month.

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SiTime introduces chip aimed at saving power in AI data centers

SiTime introduces chip aimed at saving power in AI data centers

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SiTime introduces chip aimed at saving power in AI data centers

SiTime (SITM.O) on Wednesday introduced a chip that it says is designed to help data centers built for artificial intelligence applications run more efficiently.

SiTime makes what are known as timing chips, whose job is set a steady beat for all the parts of a computer and keep them running together in sync, like a conductor in an orchestra directing multiple groups of instruments. The company says its new line of chips, called Chorus, can do so with 10 times more precision than older styles of timing chips.

SiTime CEO Rajesh Vashist said the company aims to help customers save electricity with that precision. SiTime’s chips themselves require less than a watt of power, but powerful AI chips such as Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) require more than 1,000 watts of power.

With a more precise clock to keep all the elements of a computer in sync, parts of the machine can be turned off for a few milliseconds at a time when they are not in use. Over the multiple years a power-hungry data center server might be in use, it can generate energy savings, though the amount will depend on how SiTime’s chips are used.

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“We deliver timing that they can rely on so that they can wake up their products and bring data more efficiently to them, rather than just running more often,” Vashist said in an interview.

SiTime said the chips will be available in the second half of this year.

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