Cherian Varghese on Regional expansion
From Exclusive from LEAP 2025: Zoom, Oracle Power AI in Saudi Arabia · · Gulf Business
“Saudi Arabia is a very important part of our growth strategy and even before the world could reveal the experience of Saudi Arabia we've been there in this country for the last 30 years. Today as Oracle we have the largest amount of public data centers as a vendor in this part of the world. We are present in Riyadh, we are present in Jeddah and we have got many other Sovereign Cloud partnerships, for example for STC we have almost signed a partnership and building their infrastructure.”
On , Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President of Technology - Middle East and Africa at Oracle Corporation, spoke about Regional expansion during Exclusive from LEAP 2025: Zoom, Oracle Power AI in Saudi Arabia on Gulf Business.
About Cherian Varghese
Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President of Technology for the Middle East and Africa at Oracle, has been a prominent voice on artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure in 2025. In a September 2025 TEDx talk at AURAK, he examined whether AI augments or undermines human intelligence, stating that AI will automate many jobs to "95% perfection" and that the technology is at an early stage, with society having "traversed only 5% of the AI journey." He also discussed the Stargate project, a conglomerate involving Oracle, OpenAI, and a SoftBank-funded company, and warned that AI-generated content could be manipulated by politicians to alter historical narratives, placing responsibility on ethics and compliance leaders. At LEAP 2025 in Riyadh, Varghese announced that Zoom had introduced an AI component hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, building on their existing partnership. He described Oracle's strategy in the region as a hybrid model of public and sovereign data centers, citing data sovereignty requirements in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf states. Varghese noted that Oracle has been operating in Saudi Arabia for 30 years and now has the largest number of public data centers of any vendor in the region, with sovereign cloud partnerships with STC and du Telecom. He characterized the current moment as the beginning of an exponential growth phase for AI, predicting it will become as ubiquitous as the internet.