AWS Public Sector Blog

New report: The economic impact of the new AWS Region in the Middle East

With the launch of the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released an Economic Impact Study (EIS) that estimates that the new infrastructure region will support an average of 5,984 full-time jobs annually in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the next 15 years through investments of AED 20.1 billion (US $5 billion). The study provides an overview of existing and planned AWS infrastructure investments in UAE, and the economic benefits AWS investments create for the UAE economy. Learn more about the key insights from the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region Economic Impact Study, and read the full report here.

New AWS Region in UAE to generate new opportunities in Middle East

The EIS details how AWS plans to invest in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region during 2022-2036, including both capital and operating expenditures associated with establishing and operating this new Region. This EIS also estimates AWS’s presence with the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region will contribute an estimated AED 41 billion (US$11 billion) to the economy through 2036.

Through operating this Region, which consists of three Availability Zones at launch, AWS will support an average of 5,984 full-time jobs annually in the UAE job market. These positions are associated with operations and activities supporting the new Region as well as skilled technical and information and communications technology (ICT) positions in the fields of telecommunications, software development, maintenance, electricity generation, and data center operations.

“The opening of the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is a significant milestone for Abu Dhabi and the UAE as a whole, reflecting our efforts to generate opportunities for all,” said His Excellency Mohamed Ali Al Shorafa, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development. “It strengthens Abu Dhabi’s commitment to positioning itself as a leading digital economy by leveraging cutting-edge technology to support business growth. The enhanced cloud capabilities enabled by AWS are expected to generate significant advantages and efficiencies that can propel businesses to success and realize major economic benefits for the country.”

In addition to the direct financial investments, AWS education and training programs in UAE and the Middle East will provide millions of students with no cost courses to start or advance their cloud careers. AWS will provide subsidized classroom-based training sessions for thousands of ICT professionals employed with any of the 400,000 small and medium enterprises (SME) registered with the UAE SME Council.

Customers in UAE and beyond use AWS to innovate and accelerate growth

Millions of active customers use AWS technologies every month in over 190 countries around the world, including tens of thousands of customers in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). UAE-based enterprises, startups, and public sector organizations use AWS to innovate products and services, accelerate their growth, and provide improved service to UAE-based customers and UAE residents.

Customers around the globe and in the UAE use AWS to run their mission-critical workloads to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market. This includes customers like First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), which established a cloud-first approach as one of the fundamental principles of their technology strategy. They use AWS Outposts for both development, test, and production workloads, which has accelerated their digital transformation with 50% improved time-to-market. They have also seen 60% increased developer and infrastructure team productivity by using the same infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools across the cloud and on premises. The new AWS Region in the UAE will help them realize their cloud ambitions effectively and securely while being fully compliant with local regulations.

Startups benefit from the ability to use AWS technologies to reduce the costs and time associated with procuring and deploying ICT infrastructure, and to rapidly scale up services to meet end user demand. Careem, the Dubai-based app that offers ride-hailing, mass transportation, delivery, and payments services, used AWS to scale operations as it grew to become the Middle East’s first unicorn – a startup with a value over one billion dollars – without sacrificing security. Careem uses AWS to power and connect its back-end applications, which helps them deploy end-to-end security solutions that limit fraud, while supporting 10 times annual growth for three years in a row. Careem uses Amazon Neptune, a fully managed graph database, to track, flag, and automatically block user accounts using historical user data, with a 90% accuracy rate in identifying fraudsters. Careem can scale Amazon Neptune with its applications as the number of end users grows, and it plans on deploying a machine learning (ML) platform that can improve on the already high standard of fraud detection.

New UAE Region strengthens sustainability efforts in the Middle East

Amazon is committed to running its business in an environmentally friendly way and has committed to reach net zero carbon across all business operations by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. A key component of this commitment is powering our operations with 100% renewable energy. The company is now on a path to achieve this milestone by 2025, five years ahead of the initial 2030 target. As of April 2022, Amazon has over 310 renewable energy projects across the globe.

According to a study by 451 Research, on average, organizations moving workloads from the median US enterprise data center to AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprint by 88%. Further, AWS infrastructure was found to be 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median surveyed enterprise data centers. Organizations in UAE and the Middle East that move workloads to the new AWS Middle East (UAE) infrastructure region can benefit from the net effect of Amazon’s sustainability efforts to reduce their carbon footprint.

Learn more about the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region

To learn more about how enterprises and organizations can benefit from this new Region and AWS’s presence in the Middle East, read the full AWS Economic Impact Study today.

Learn more about the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region and discover more about AWS in the Middle East here.

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