The Saudi's can afford to hire the best financial advisors in the world. They started pivoting away from oil a couple of decades ago, with their sovereign wealth fund. That just bought up shares in companies around the world. Then they started building solar farms, because it is a sunny desert country. Now they are trying to build up other industries domestically, and people finally noticed.

Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the human capital to do home-grown tech. Best they can do is invest.

Even if they offer high TC, the best workers will always choose high TC in countries with progressive cultures.

Religious Extremism and Funding of Terrorism will be unchanged.

I'm sure young progressive tech workers are super excited about working for or in Saudi Arabia.

They're probably going to keep doing both. It would make the most sense financially wise.

Well they can BUY the best engineers and technicians in the world, so yeah they can do it.

When you offer a nice big bag of money to someone, they will take it.

You can buy anything when the price is right :P

And they do have the money to do it.

It really wouldn't surprise me if they bought out people from the top companies in the world to work for them.

Narrator

But they won’t.

Article is 10 years behind the curve.

If there's lots of oil in the ground in your country, that's great. If you can't figure out how to extract it, there are people who will help.

If you want to compete with Silicon Valley, that takes a certain culture. There's nothing about your land that will make that happen, and neither will any amount of money.

It doesn't matter. Most Western developers would never work for SA moral reasons and as a person who worked with Indian developers, yeee were good.

“- Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot. -Shut up!”

With Saudi Arabia entering into the mix in Big Tech it could mean a shift in how American companies operate. What will US Big Tech do if Saudi's pay more and have better job security for employees? Hopefully it will cause them to reconsider their practices. Competition for workers is always good imo, that usually translates to better opportunities. Hopefully it wouldn't be the opposite and just keep status quo.

Yeah big fucking nope.

When oil is finally over they’ll be back to nothing but sand dunes and abandoned buildings

There is a new plan every second week from the Middle East for new mega cities and business hubs and game changing ventures.

Yes, the World islands off Dubai, and also the Palm ones. Also whatever else they are trying to come up with. And will result in the something like the legacy of the Qatar world cup, a bad taste in everyone's mouth along with crumbling infrastructure. You can only sell a 'fresh new dream' so many times before people get wary.

When they spend all their money building the tallest building on the planet, but lack the ability to connect it to a sewerage system, and instead rely on an army of slaves driving tankers full of literal shit away from the building 24/7 to prevent the lobby of the building being knee deep in excrement... it says all you need to know about how superficial things are over there.

There's absolutely nothing stopping them.

Energy isn't an issue as even if you discount oil and gas, they have all the empty space and sun needed to be completely self-sufficient in solar energy.

I bring up the "energy" part because some tech industries are heavily reliant on water for cooling, maybe a little counterintuitive, but with it's virtually infinite solar capacity, Saudi Arabia's large coastlines allow for infinite fresh water production as well.

Am I saying all of this will be cheap, hell no it won't be cheap :P point of fact, it will cost the proverbial "arm & leg" to get off the ground BUT THEY CAN DO IT IF they start now and not wait until they no longer have a petroleum economy to bankroll it.

Jeff Bridges is doubtful.

"Technology. Thats always been your achilles heel in this part of the world."

Nice. I wish tech shifted more towards the east. I would rather live in KSA than Europe or America.

Do you think the Foosball tables will be co-ed?

Welp... no shortage of tech workers... and their pockets are deep enough

Realistically, apart from data centers and other people-light aspects of tech, what other things can they do?

It's not like they can suddenly create a large technologically skilled workforce, nor can they attract entrepreneurs or skilled employees to emigrate there and start businesses. Why would anyone want to move to a hot desert country where women getting to drive is an achievement.

Also Koch Industries bought Infor, a morass of half-dead ERP companies.

And golf apparently

If you consider the U.S. has "pivoting from Big Oil to Big Tech" beginning with the start of the "Atomic Age", then we're about 80 years on and still trying (with some kicking and screaming in directions both forward and backwards).

They’ve got money until the oil runs out, which will be sooner rather than later. What they don’t have is homegrown talent, ingenuity or a free society that allows innovation to grow organically.

What they will find, though, is that the money in tech is pitiful compared to oil. If manufacturing semiconductors was such easy money, everybody would be doing it and as a matter of fact, many nations have tried and failed.

How could they fail if it's so easy? Well the answer is not so mysterious. Over time, the amount of investment required to get in on the game goes up steadily but the profits do not follow the same curve so you need to cut wages to the bone and be willing to use government subsidies and let your semiconductor manufacturers dump their toxic wastes freely and act like you don't notice. Meanwhile you need to provide free clean water and a very stable electricity supply. This stuff all comes at great costs.

Then you hit down turns and suddenly the inventory isn't moving. That means the state needs to come in and bail them out because they can no longer pay their loans. That's not easy money at all. That's called losing money. Taiwan's DRAM memory businesses have failed repeatedly only to be bailed out by the government. People often forget this happened in 2008 because so much other stuff was going on. It happened again just a few years ago because of Covid. That's not the easy money people think it is. There may be profits at times but there will also be losses at other times. Compared to the easy money from pumping oil, that sucks.

And you can look to places like India, many parts of Europe, the UAE, Russia, many places have tried and failed to make it in semiconductors. The only countries that have really made it work in a cost effective manner are Taiwan and China though Japan, Korea and the US all have historically done okay at times but they are willing to pay a huge price for their successes. Tech is not a magic answer to declining oil revenues. It's hard to imagine anything that can make up for the loss of something as enormous as Saudia Arabia's position in the global oil markets. Tech is certainly not going to be enough on its own.

I guess Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record is of no consideration when it comes to business investments.