Governments across the MENA region are positioning themselves as emerging AI hubs, with IT investments leading the charge. Management consultancy Gartner projects IT spending in the region to reach $230.7 billion by 2025, marking a 7.4% rise from 2024.

The Gartner CIO & IT Executive Conference explored the evolving tech priorities driving this growth. Experts highlighted two primary areas of focus for IT expenditure in the region: cloud infrastructure and advancements in Generative AI and data centers.

Mim Burt, Managing VP Analyst at Gartner, revealed that “local organizations are ramping up investments in research and development to create new business models, enhance customer experiences, and build a skilled workforce for global competitiveness, thereby boosting IT spending in the region.”

According to Gartner and data from regional governments, investments in data centers across the MENA region are projected to grow by nearly 15% in 2025. This surge reflects the rising adoption of AI and cloud services, alongside increasing demand for data storage and processing capacity.

“Increased spending on data center technologies will aid the growing adoption of AI and cloud services, as well as the rise in consumption of data storage and processing capacity,” said Burt. Gartner also projects that several hyper-scalers in the MENA region are beginning to push for more sustainable strategies to scale AI developments and embrace cloud infrastructure.

“Pilots and trials have cooled the hype on GenAI as CIOs are beginning to realize the challenges related to data and the cost versus value of these GenAI pilots,” said Eyad Tachwali, Sr Director Advisory at Gartner.” According to Tachwali, in order to “address these barriers CIOs will need to take a portfolio approach to their use cases aligned with business priorities and invest in data and AI literacy that focus on the ‘doing’ as much as the ‘knowing’ to derive value from their GenAI investments.”