Google has signed a deal with an oil producer company, Aramco, to sell cloud computing services in Saudi Arabia. It seems like a controversial move by the Internet giant as the staff might backlash on the giant for the thought of doing business with the fossil fuel industry or regimes accused of human rights abuses.
With the partnership, the company said that Google would get a chance to set up its “cloud region” in the Kingdom. Employees called on the company to abstain from work in the oil and amp; gas industry due to environmental concerns and work with authoritarian regimes.
Despite the abstain, Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer of Google’s Cloud Unit, has pushed to service the energy industry. There are just a handful of fields where Google is trying to chase Microsoft Corp and Amazon in the cloud-computing market.
“With this agreement, Google Cloud’s innovative technology and solutions will be available to global customers and enterprises in Saudi Arabia to enable them to serve end consumers better,” Kurian said in a statement.
Saudi Aramco is a division of the state-run “Saudi Arabian Oil Co. Aramco” announced that it had signed a preliminary agreement with Google in 2018. Right after that agreement, a famous Silicon Valley tour by Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was conducted. The trip was also about the prince visiting Google and meeting its top executives on that trip.
