From Riyadh to Dubai, the region’s digital ambitions are transforming how economies operate, governments deliver services, and industries create value. At the centre of this shift is a key enabler: the hybrid cloud, which has become the defining architecture of the AI era by connecting public-scale computing power with local data governance.
The Middle East has understood this dynamic of technology earlier than most regions. By investing in hybrid models and AI-ready infrastructure, it is defining what a truly intelligent and sovereign digital economy can look like. Recently, the Middle East and Pakistan Hybrid Cloud Market Survey (2025), released by Omdia, rated Huawei as the top provider of hybrid cloud services in the region, lauding its unique capabilities in the customer service and market categories.
The recognition reflects a wider truth across the region: the Middle East is shaping cloud technology to fit its own priorities of sovereignty.
A regional model for digital sovereignty
With investments in hybrid cloud and local data centres, countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are creating an innovative model of digital sovereignty in the region that treats data as a national asset and a source of economic strength.
Ranked top for local compliance by Omdia, Huawei Cloud’s integration in Riyadh region now serves as a major hub for AI and cloud innovation in the Middle East and Central Asia, offering more than one hundred locally delivered services tailored to government and enterprise requirements. The company also invests in local capability through programmes such as the Huawei ICT Competition, run in partnership with UNESCO, which has already trained more than half a million ICT professionals and aims to reach one million within the decade.
Ankabut, the largest ICT service provider in the UAE’s education sector, has also evolved into a powerful education cloud platform built on Huawei Cloud Stack. Serving more than 120 educational institutions, including universities, research centres, and vocational schools, Ankabut delivers a wide range of cloud-based services that are helping the UAE advance education and research.
Among its many initiatives, the Ankabut education cloud also supports the UAE’s Research Support & Data Intelligence Centre (RSDIC) health research platform. Leveraging secure and reliable storage with 99.9999999% (nine nines) data durability, the platform enables complete genome analysis for 5,000 people through high-performance computing. Its cloud-native security and access control ensure that researchers can securely access and share health data, fostering efficient and collaborative research.
Innovation: From cloud-native to AI-native
The next generation of cloud is designed to learn, to reason, and to adapt, and in the evolution toward AI-Native Cloud architecture, every layer, from storage and compute to applications, is being infused with intelligence. As AI capabilities advance, the demand for reliable, efficient environments to run AI applications continues to grow. Omdia’s recent report on on-premises inferencing AI workloads reflects this shift and notes Huawei’s strengths in providing infrastructure that supports running trained AI models at scale.
In its latest technology, the Huawei Cloud Stack 8.6 has integrated AI training and data management into one system that keeps intelligence close to the source of data. This allows financial simulations to run in real time, digital twins of cities to learn continuously, and hospitals to train diagnostic models on local data without compromising patient privacy.
At the infrastructure level, the platform’s AI supernode architecture supports high-performance on-premises AI computing centres. Combined with ModelArts, Huawei’s end-to-end AI development platform, and GaussDB, its enterprise-grade distributed database, the system provides a foundation that combines innovation with compliance.
Reliable and available cloud foundation
Nations across the region are focused on innovation while strictly maintaining control over their most valuable asset, data. Financial regulators are keeping sensitive information within national borders while accessing large-scale computing for analytics and risk modelling. Energy companies are training AI systems on seismic data that must remain local. Governments are deploying generative AI to automate citizen services while meeting strict security and compliance standards.
Performing strongly with one of the fastest customer support response times, Huawei Cloud Stack, the cloud technology adopted by most countries in the region, provides 24/7 services through five global O&M centres, serving over 5,500 enterprise customers across more than 170 countries and regions, accelerating digital transformation worldwide. According to Omdia, Huawei Cloud Stack is rated the top vendor for reliability and availability, with low customer ticket frequency and minimal recovery time, reflecting its robust architecture and exceptional operational stability.
Pakistan HEC, the government body funding, overseeing, regulating, and accrediting higher education institutions across the country, leverages Huawei Cloud Stack to power the national education innovation in Pakistan. Through a dual-region disaster recovery architecture, it ensures the continuous stability of the National Education Cloud, supporting more than 450 higher education institutions and 4 million students. With cloud-native containers and big data platforms built directly into the system, universities can run real-time simulations, build digital twins, and accelerate research. This hybrid cloud foundation is also helping develop the country’s ICT talent, enabling institutions to access advanced technologies and drive new opportunities in education and research.
Building the foundation for an intelligent economy
As AI becomes embedded in every layer of business and government, the cloud combines intelligence with governance, delivering the scale needed for innovation, the control required for compliance, and the flexibility that allows transformation to happen safely and sustainably. Today’s intelligent age depends on innovative hybrid cloud, the invisible architecture that brings data, AI, and policy into a unified environment.
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