News

Amazon Is Planning To Create Over 1,500 Jobs In Saudi Arabia

Published

4 years ago

March 23, 2021

Amazon

E-commerce giant, Amazon, has recently announced its plan to open 11 brand new buildings across Saudi Arabia. Once all the new buildings are opened, which should happen by the end of 2021, they will create over 1,500 new jobs.

Right now, Amazon has three warehouses in Saudi Arabia, referred to as fulfillment centers, located in Riyadh and Jeddah. With the planned buildings, Amazon’s total floor area is supposed to reach 867,000 square feet, or about 80,000 square meters.

Amazon wants to enhance its storage capacity by 89 percent and its geographical delivery network by 58 percent to better cope with the growing demand for its services in the region. In addition to building new facilities, the company will also upgrade existing ones to enable faster, smarter, and more consistent deliveries of products to customers.

“These new investments reiterate our commitment to Saudi Arabia, contributing to the local economy through the creation of new job opportunities,” said Prashant Saran, Amazon’s Middle East and North Africa director of operations.

“Our investments in technology and infrastructure align with Saudi’s digital transformation goals, enabling world-class fulfillment offerings to our independent seller partners, and faster delivery on an expanded product selection to our customers,” Saran added.

Amazon is among the biggest winners of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its net profit increased by 84 percent to $21.3 billion as revenue grew 38 percent to $386.1 billion. In January of this year, the company launched its Amazon Prime service in Saudi Arabia, offering many convenient perks to Saudi shoppers, including free same-day and next-day delivery.

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A small survey of nearly 1,000 Saudi shoppers conducted by advertising platform Criteo last year found that 58 percent of Saudis now prefer online shopping to in-store shopping, and 35 percent see the cost of shipping as a big factor in their decision-making process.

With the new facilities, Amazon will be ready to expand its presence in the region even further to meet customers’ growing expectations.

News

Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users

The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

Nour Nasir

Google

Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.

Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.

Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.

Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.

Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide

To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.

While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.

Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.