A telecom company just became a cloud provider, and that shift says a lot about where Saudi Arabia’s B2B infrastructure market is heading. Salam, one of Saudi Arabia’s major telecommunications and digital infrastructure providers, signed a memorandum of understanding with Nutanix at LEAP 2026 to deliver Private Cloud Infrastructure as a Service to enterprise customers across the Kingdom, a three-year managed service partnership that pairs Salam’s telecom network with Nutanix’s hybrid multicloud technology.
The arrangement gives Salam something it didn’t have on its own: a proven private cloud platform it can layer onto its existing network infrastructure and market directly to Saudi businesses. Nutanix brings the underlying technology, while Salam brings deep familiarity with the local market and a telecommunications backbone already reaching enterprise customers across the Kingdom. Together, the pitch is straightforward: businesses get cloud infrastructure with the flexibility and scalability they’d expect from a public cloud provider, but with the security and control that comes from keeping infrastructure private.
Abdullah Khorami, Salam’s chief business officer, framed the partnership around combining local market expertise with proven cloud technology to meet what he described as the highest standards of performance, security, and scalability. He said the goal is helping businesses across the Kingdom move through their digital transformation efforts with more confidence than they’d have going it alone.
Talal Al-Saif, Nutanix’s regional director for Saudi Arabia, described the collaboration as bringing the company’s private cloud infrastructure capabilities to businesses throughout the country for the first time at this scale, framing it as a shared effort to give organizations more modern, flexible IT options that support real growth rather than just infrastructure for its own sake.
The timing lines up with Saudi Arabia’s broader economic diversification push. As more enterprises across the Kingdom modernize their IT infrastructure, demand for cloud solutions that don’t force a tradeoff between flexibility and data control keeps growing, particularly among businesses in regulated sectors where keeping infrastructure private isn’t optional. Salam’s telecom footprint gives it a distribution advantage most pure cloud providers entering the market don’t have, since it’s already got relationships and network access with the enterprise customers Nutanix is trying to reach.
Whether Saudi businesses actually adopt private cloud at the pace both companies are betting on will depend on how well Salam can translate Nutanix’s technology into something that fits the specific compliance and operational demands of the local market.
