Saudi Arabia To Witness Opening 1st Metaverse Academy in MENA

Meta plans to set up a Metaverse Academy in Saudi Arabia to be the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

This announcement was made during the first day of the LEAP 23 Conference, which started in Riyadh on Monday, set to close doors on Thursday, Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

During the opening of the event, Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah bin Amer Al-Swaha said his country will pump investments worth more than $9 billion in future technologies, digital entrepreneurship, and tech startups to make the Arab country a leading digital market in the MENA region.

Swaha pointed to investments that are expected to be made by companies like Oracle and Huawei worth $1.9 billion in launching new cloud areas in the Kingdom, adding Microsoft will pump $2.1 billion investment in setting up a hyper-scale cloud in the country. LEAP 23 is expected to attract more than 250,000 visitors from around the world this year.

It is worth mentioning that Meta opened its first Metaverse Academy in the world in France. The academy is supposed to qualify students for the technological demands that the metaverse needs in areas of virtual reality and augmented reality.

The metaverse is expected to contribute $15 billion to the economies of the Gulf countries by 2030 given that their governments are tapping into the virtual space, according to a study by Strategy&.

Saudi Arabia topped the GCC countries in terms of metaverse contributions, as it is predicted to account for $7.6 billion by 2030 (more than half of the figure. While the UAE came second with an expected share of $3.3 billion. The predicted figures reflect the two countries’ tremendous efforts to deploy the usage of the metaverse in their respective national program, the report noted.