Saudi Arabia has urged Gulf Cooperation Council states to build sustainable digital links between them and to integrate computing capacity in a way that protects data sovereignty and helps Gulf companies compete worldwide. Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha delivered the Kingdom's address at the 30th meeting of the GCC Ministerial Committee for Post and Telecommunications in Bahrain.

Alswaha said that, under the directives of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister, the Kingdom is working with its Gulf partners on three pillars: moving from digital resilience to AI leadership, integrating energy and computing while safeguarding data sovereignty, and building common markets for entrepreneurship.

To keep data and communications flowing across the GCC, he said, the Kingdom has added more than 8.4 terabits per second of international capacity, raising total capacity by about 80% to 18 Tbps. It has also submitted a proposal to the GCC General Secretariat and the presidency for a sustainable digital interconnection modelled on the Gulf electricity grid.

The Kingdom has made a range of sites and 14 gigawatts of power available for data centers serving Saudi Arabia, the GCC, the region and the world, and he called for a sustainable model of cooperation in this area.

Alswaha called for open markets and harmonised standards for Gulf companies, noting that GCC states host more than 20 unicorns and attract about 95% of venture capital investment in the region. The next phase, he said, requires the Gulf to act as a single ecosystem in data, computing, cloud and AI.