Muscat: Oman’s next phase of artificial intelligence growth will depend less on applications and more on the infrastructure needed to host, secure and scale them locally, a senior Otech official said.Hassan Al Lawati said Otech, the fully owned technology arm of Omantel, is expanding its cloud, data centre, cybersecurity and AI computing capabilities as government and enterprise demand for local digital infrastructure increases.

Speaking at a banking technology forum, Al Lawati said Otech currently operates seven Tier-3-certified data centres with a combined capacity of 12 megawatts, including facilities in Muscat and Duqm, while expanding local AI computing infrastructure using NVIDIA GPU platforms.

“The cloud is built in layers,” Al Lawati said, describing a structure that includes data centres, infrastructure, software platforms and application data. “If you understand this structure, then you can plan and organise your applications in a better way.” He said the company has evolved from traditional co-location and hosting services into a broader provider of cloud computing, managed services, cybersecurity and AI infrastructure serving sectors including telecoms, oil and gas, banking, healthcare and government.According to Al Lawati, Otech currently serves around 1,200 customers and has expanded into AI and large language model (LLM) services over the past three years, including GPU-based workloads for healthcare imaging, computer vision and seismic analysis.The company also provides multi-cloud services through partnerships including AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Huawei Cloud, while additional agreements with global cloud providers are under development.

Al Lawati said banks and enterprises are increasingly modernising legacy systems through cloud-native applications, cybersecurity integration and AI-enabled digital platforms, with some fintech applications deployed within days using containerised cloud technologies. One of the most significant developments highlighted during the presentation was the expansion of locally hosted government AI systems.

Al Lawati said Otech is supporting government AI and LLM use cases through a national platform developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology, with around 23,000 government users connected to the system. He added that organisations are increasingly seeking greater control over data, applications and cybersecurity infrastructure as cloud adoption accelerates across sectors.

The push reflects a broader regional trend as Gulf states invest heavily in data centres, AI computing capacity and sovereign digital infrastructure as part of wider economic diversification and technology strategies. While much of the global AI conversation remains focused on applications and chatbots, the underlying competition is increasingly shifting toward the infrastructure powering them — including data centres, compute capacity, cloud platforms and cybersecurity systems. For Oman, that could position digital infrastructure as an increasingly strategic pillar of Vision 2040 alongside logistics, energy and industrial diversification efforts.

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