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By Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur
Adam Satariano reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Paul Mozur from Taipei, Taiwan.
On a Monday morning last month, technical directors, engineers and sales representatives from Amazon, Google, TikTok and other corporations faced a three-hour traffic jam as their cars slowly drove toward a giant convention at an event in the desert, 80 kilometers from Riyadh. .
The lure: billions of dollars in Saudi Arabia as the kingdom seeks to build a tech industry to complement its oil dominance.
To get around the traffic jams, frustrated spectators made their way to the shoulder of the road, kicking columns of desert sand as they passed those obeying traffic rules. A lucky few benefited from a special outing committed to “V. V. I. P. ” – lots and lots of people.
“Into the future,” read a sign in the run-up to the event, Leap.
More than 200,000 people converged on the conference, adding Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon’s cloud computing division, who announced a $5. 3 billion investment in Saudi Arabia for knowledge centers and synthetic intelligence technology. Arvind Krishna, chief executive of IBM, spoke of what one government minister called a “lifelong friendship” with the kingdom. Executives from Huawei and dozens of other corporations gave speeches. More than $10 billion worth of transactions were made there, according to Saudi Arabia’s State News Agency.
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