Aramco’s venture capital arm Wa’ed Ventures has invested in UK AI cloud provider Ori.

Financial terms of the investment have not been shared, but the funding will be used to support Ori’s expansion into the Middle East market over the next 12 months.

Ori’s first move in the Middle East will be the launch of a regional subsidiary located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The investment follows Ori’s recent £140 million ($176.23m) raise, and the AI cloud provider has another larger raise underway that will be completed in 2025.

Founder and CEO of Ori, Mahdi Yahya, said: “We are thrilled to welcome Saudi Aramco’s VC fund Wa’ed Ventures as a strategic investor in Ori. This partnership not only provides us with the resources to scale faster into the Middle East, but also aligns with our vision to provide end-to-end AI infrastructure for innovators and businesses around the world.”

CIO of Wa’ed Ventures, Muhammed Zeeshan Hassan, added: “At Wa’ed Ventures, we seek to empower pioneering startups that bring transformative technologies to the local and regional market. Our investment in Ori reflects our commitment to advancing AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.

“As demand for GPU cloud solutions accelerates, Ori’s technology enables businesses to scale AI workloads efficiently. This partnership will also provide our AI portfolio companies with cutting-edge cloud infrastructure, ensuring they have the computing power needed to build and scale transformative AI solutions.”

Ori was founded in 2019, and now operates in more than 20 locations worldwide. The company recently added Nvidia’s H200 chips to its GPU offering in the UK and is preparing for the Nvidia GB200 systems. In October 2024, Ori launched a private cloud cluster comprised of 1,024 Nvidia H100s, and based on the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD reference architecture.

The company does not own its data centers, but leases space in colocation facilities. It is a known customer of EdgeConneX in Europe and Centersquare in the US.

Wa’ed Ventures is a $500 million fund that invests in tech startups across various verticals and began looking at international companies in 2022, specifically those that can bring technology platforms and services into Saudi Arabia. The company has also backed AI chipmaker Rebellions.

State-owned Aramco is the world’s largest producer of oil and has rights to the world’s second-largest proven crude oil reserves. In 2017, a report by CDP and the Climate Accountability Institute found that Aramco was responsible for 4.5 percent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions from 1988 to 2015, placing second to the country of China. Aramco set up Wa’ed Ventures in 2013.