Cherian Varghese on Data sovereignty
From Exclusive from LEAP 2025: Zoom, Oracle Power AI in Saudi Arabia · · Gulf Business
“The game is quickly changed now it's all about hybrid data centers so customers are trying to put their own data center behind their firewall which we call it as a private cloud at the same time public cloud. So what we did is we tried to find the mix and match of both and why did we do that purely because of data sovereignty by each of the countries. Saudi Arabia government doesn't want his data to go out, same way UAE doesn't want to do it, same way for Oman, same for Bahrain and same is for Qatar.”
On , Cherian Varghese, Senior Vice President of Technology - Middle East and Africa at Oracle Corporation, spoke about Data sovereignty 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.