At the time of his dealings with the crown
prince, Bezos had been looking for a site in the
Middle East to expand Amazon’s cloud services.
The billionaire technology mogul had visited
Saudi Arabia in 2016 to meet with the crown
prince before meeting with him again during
the prince’s tour of the United States in 2018.
The company ultimately selected the island
nation of Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia,
which opened in July.
Amazon has also expanded into the Middle East
with its 2017 purchase of e-commerce website
Souq.com, which is a competitor of Noon.com,
a platform that launched that same year and is
heavily funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment
Fund that is overseen by the crown prince.