Saudi Enterprises Rebuild Technology Stacks as AI Adoption Accelerates: Nutanix
Container adoption is on the rise as businesses prepare AI workloads for production while balancing performance, security, and sovereign data requirements.
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[Image: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
New research from enterprise cloud company Nutanix suggests that organizations across Saudi Arabia are redesigning their technology stacks to support AI workloads, with application containerization, hybrid multicloud architectures, and data sovereignty emerging as central priorities. The findings also point to a growing governance gap as AI adoption spreads faster than organizational controls.
The Saudi findings are part of Nutanix’s eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), which surveyed 1,600 IT, cloud, and engineering decision-makers globally, including respondents from Saudi Arabia.
The report indicates that containers—long considered a software engineering tool—are increasingly becoming strategic infrastructure for enterprise AI. According to the survey, 85% of Saudi IT executives expect containerization within their organizations to increase over the next three years, while 72% believe AI is already accelerating container adoption, with nearly a quarter saying the impact has been significant.
Among organizations already running AI-enabled applications in containers, 82% are building new AI applications directly using container-based architectures, either exclusively or alongside efforts to modernize legacy systems.
The shift shows that rather than simply deploying large language models or AI assistants, organizations are investing in application architectures that make AI workloads easier to scale, secure, and move across environments.
Performance, security, and cost each ranked equally among the top motivations for increasing container adoption over the next year, cited by 45% of respondents. The findings suggest that infrastructure modernization is becoming inseparable from enterprise AI strategies, particularly as organizations seek greater flexibility in where applications and data reside.
That issue is especially relevant in Saudi Arabia, where data residency requirements continue to shape cloud adoption decisions.
Nearly 78% of respondents described data sovereignty as a high priority or an essential consideration in infrastructure decisions. Meanwhile, 53% said security and data protection concerns require them to operate infrastructure entirely within Saudi Arabia, whether through on-premises deployments or local cloud regions.
Despite those priorities, enterprises are not abandoning the public cloud. Instead, the report points to a hybrid operating model. More than half (52%) of containerized applications are currently running on public cloud infrastructure, compared with 43% on private cloud or on-premises environments, indicating that organizations are balancing cloud scalability with regulatory requirements rather than choosing one over the other.
However, the report also highlights governance challenges accompanying broader AI adoption.
Seventy-seven percent of Saudi IT leaders believe the use of AI tools outside official oversight creates business risk, although this concern is somewhat lower than the global average of 87%.
Those concerns are grounded in experience. Nearly 65% of respondents said they have already encountered AI applications or AI agents introduced by employees outside IT departments, underscoring the growing prevalence of “shadow AI,” i.e., the use of generative AI tools without formal organizational governance.
The research also points to organizational fragmentation as a contributing factor. Seventy percent of Saudi respondents said silos between IT and business units hinder technology execution, suggesting that AI governance is increasingly becoming a cross-functional leadership challenge rather than solely an IT responsibility.
“Saudi organizations are moving quickly from AI experimentation to real-world deployment, but success depends on having the right foundation in place,” said Talal Alsaif, Regional Director, Central Gulf, Nutanix.
He argued that enterprises will need a hybrid multicloud infrastructure capable of supporting containers while strengthening governance and maintaining data sovereignty if they are to scale AI effectively.
