center3, a subsidiary of stc Group, has completed a 9.6MW expansion of its Khurais, Riyad hyperscaler-grade data centre, enhancing its hosting capacity for customers.
center3 say the expansion was built to meet global hyperscalers requirements and will help develop the MENA region’s digital industry as it features state-of-the-art infrastructure and advanced technologies.
The additional capacity will allow hyperscalers and other customers of the data centre to scale their cloud and other digital services faster and more reliably.
“We are proud to announce the expansion of our Khurais data centre in Riyadh. We are committed to investing in the latest technologies and providing exceptional services to our customers while meeting growing demand,” said Eng. Fahad Al Hajeri, CEO of center3.
“Through this milestone, we also contribute to the regional data centre industry’s development, which is crucial for the Kingdom and the wider region’s digital transformation as it enables the localisation of digital applications.”
The expansion of the Khurais data centre ties into centre3’s vision to develop its portfolio in Saudi Arabia. The company has plans to launch new facilities in Jeddah, Riyadh, Dammam, and other strategic locations in the Kingdom in order to meet high availability, disaster recovery, and scalability requirements for local players.
center3 aims to reach over 300MW of managed capacity in the next few years and is targeting international expansion to meet these goals.
stc Group has started to employee its “DARE” strategy, which outlines development plans to position Saudi Arabia as a major digital hub for the MENA region. It will aim to achieve the vision by using Center3 alongside other subsidiaries to offer full ICT ecosystem solutions.
TAWAL for example, its towerco subsidiary, has made moves into Central & Eastern Europe and Pakistan in the past two years.
In 2021, the Kingdom’s government announced an $18 billion investment into making Saudi Arabia the main data centre hub for the MENA Region.
“We are enabling local champions to play a bigger role in the coming phase of Saudi Vision 2030, to increase the growth of hyper-scale co-location capacity data centres needed to attract other digital investments, such as cloud service providers, gaming publishers, video streaming service operators and content delivery network (CDN) operators to localise their services inside the Kingdom,” Bassam Al-Bassam, deputy minister for telecom and digital infrastructure at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said at the time.
