VIDEO: ‘At Aramco, it’s all about engineering, science, and deep tech.’

Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter
Executive vice president of Technology and Innovation
WEF Davos 2026

In Aramco, it's all about engineering, science, and deep tech and where we see the greatest value.

We're talking about $1.8 billion generated from the application of digital and AI alone, much of it contributed by technologies from startups. 

We've grown our venture investments and they have been delivering strategic value for the company, in terms of applications of technology.

For the startup there's a great win, because there's nothing more important than that first sale, that first market penetration. And that's what we offer as a company. 

And what we want to do in Dhahran is leverage this opportunity, where we are spending on capital investment every year.

That is a concentration rare in any other place in the world.

We have built up an industrial ecosystem around our company. 

That means that we have means and incentives to allow investment in scale up.

What we're focusing on initially is AI, because AI is the greatest opportunity for the century and I think that's an area where we have been able to create the greatest value for our company.

And we think there's an opportunity for startups, especially since we're providing a lot of infrastructure for AI in the form of our investments.

We continuously adopt that technology and that technology has maintained our competitiveness and basically our profits over the years.

Because businesses now they have to not just make a profit, but they actually have to introduce technology because that maintains our competitive edge.