Saudi Arabia’s capital markets regulator said on Monday that the kingdom would allow foreign investments in listed companies that own properties within “the boundaries of the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah” as the government seeks to attract more investment.

The move is designed to boost investment, improve the appeal and efficiency of the capital market, and enhance its regional and global competitiveness, all while providing support to the local economy, the Capital Market Authority (CMA) said in a statement.

Saudi Arabia’s markets watchdog said that under the initiative, foreign investment would be limited to shares, convertible debt instruments, or both and would exclude “strategic foreign investors.” The initiative seeks to attract foreign capital and ensure the necessary liquidity for ongoing and upcoming projects in Makkah and Madinah.

The CMA said that foreign ownership cannot exceed 49 per cent of a company’s listed shares. The market regulator allowed foreigners to subscribe to real estate funds (REITs) investing within the boundaries of Islam’s two holiest sites of Mecca and Medina in 2021.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has introduced sweeping reforms to investment laws and loosened foreign ownership rules in the stock market to boost its investment appeal as part of its Vision 2030 diversification strategy.

Saudi Arabia aims to attract 30 million pilgrims for Hajj and the year-round pilgrimage of Umrah annually by the end of the decade. The kingdom earned about $12bn from the two pilgrimages in 2019, according to official data.

Read: Saudi Arabia’s real estate, infrastructure projects hit $1.25tn

Technology shares fell on Tuesday as a global market rout sparked by the emergence of a low-cost Chinese artificial intelligence model entered day two, with investors questioning the sky-high valuation and dominance of AI bellwethers.

Shares of Nvidia, the poster child of the AI boom in recent years, dragged US stocks lower, sinking 17 per cent on Monday and wiping $593bn from the chipmaker’s market value, a record one-day loss for any company.

It all stemmed from a free AI assistant launched by Chinese startup DeepSeek last week that the firm said uses less data at a fraction of the cost of services available currently, garnering significant attention worldwide including from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who called it an “impressive model”.

READ MORE: What is DeepSeek and why is it disrupting the AI sector?

“We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor!,” Altman, the head of the AI firm behind ChatGPT, said in a social media post.

The launch and increasing popularity of DeepSeek spurred investors to dump tech stocks globally, with ripples felt from Tokyo to Amsterdam to Silicon Valley.

In Japan, chip-testing equipment maker Advantest, a supplier to Nvidia, lost 10 per cent on Tuesday after diving nearly 9 per cent on Monday. Chip-making equipment maker Tokyo Electron fell 5.3 per cent, while technology start-up investor SoftBank Group 9984.T was 6 per cent lower.

Over in the US, Broadcom finished down 17.4 per cent, followed by ChatGPT backer Microsoft which fell 2.1 per cent and then Google parent Alphabet which ended down 4.2 per cent.

The Philadelphia semiconductor index tumbled 9.2 per cent, for its deepest percentage drop since March 2020. Tech heavy South Korean and Taiwan markets are closed for Lunar New Year.

The selloff has brought into the spotlight the crowded positioning among investors as well as the extremely high valuation of some of these firms.

“What makes Monday’s tech selloff so jarring is that the valuations of many of these AI and tech companies offer no margin of error,” said David Bahnsen, chief investment officer at The Bahnsen Group.

“The excessive weighting these tech stocks have in many investor portfolios and the high concentration these tech stocks have in the market indices was a significant and under-appreciated risk issue.”

The hype around AI has powered a huge flow of capital into equities in the last 18 months, inflating valuations and lifting stock markets to record highs.

It is not just the chipmakers and tech companies but companies focused on datacentres also taking a hit, with Malaysia’s utility conglomerate YTL Power down 7.5 per cent on Tuesday, its third session of steep loss.

Jun Rong Yeap, market strategist at IG, said there may be some “sell first, think later” thinking at play, with opinions divided on whether DeepSeek will eventually be the so-called game-changer that reshapes the U.S. AI landscape.

“But if anything, market participants dislike uncertainties and are clearly unwilling to take the risks in the near term.”

Little is known about the Hangzhou startup behind DeepSeek, whose controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, records showed.

Its researchers wrote in a paper last month that DeepSeek-V3 model, launched on Jan. 10, used Nvidia‘s lower-capability H800 chips for training, at a cost of less than $6m.

Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo, said the development serves as a reminder that competition in the global AI arena is intensifying and Nvidia may not be in pole position forever.

“By developing cutting-edge AI models with less advanced and more cost-efficient hardware, DeepSeek challenges the heavy investments U.S. tech companies are pouring into high-cost AI infrastructure.”

Investor focus will now be on the flurry of tech earnings this week, with executives likely keen to calm frayed nerves.

Chinese startup DeepSeek‘s launch of its latest AI models, which it says are on a par or better than industry-leading models in the United States at a fraction of the cost, is threatening to upset the technology world order.

The company has attracted attention in global AI circles after writing in a paper last month that the training of DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6m worth of computing power from Nvidia H800 chips.

DeepSeek‘s AI Assistant, powered by DeepSeek-V3, has overtaken rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application available on Apple’s App Store in the United States.

This has raised doubts about the reasoning behind some US tech companies’ decision to pledge billions of dollars in AI investment and shares of several big tech players, including Nvidia, have been hit.

Below are some facts about the company shaking up the AI sector worldwide.

Why is DeepSeek causing a stir?

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 caused a scramble among Chinese tech firms, who rushed to create their own chatbots powered by artificial intelligence.

But after the release of the first Chinese ChatGPT equivalent, made by search engine giant Baidu, there was widespread disappointment in China at the gap in AI capabilities between US and Chinese firms.

The quality and cost efficiency of DeepSeek‘s models have flipped this narrative on its head. The two models that have been showered with praise by Silicon Valley executives and US tech company engineers alike, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, are on par with OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced models, the Chinese startup has said.

They are also cheaper to use. The DeepSeek-R1, released last week, is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than OpenAI o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek‘s official WeChat account.

But some have publicly expressed scepticism about DeepSeek‘s success story.

Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said during an interview with CNBC on Thursday, without providing evidence, that DeepSeek has 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips, which he claimed would not be disclosed because that would violate Washington’s export controls that ban such advanced AI chips from being sold to Chinese companies. DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegation.

Bernstein analysts on Monday highlighted in a research note that DeepSeek‘s total training costs for its V3 model were unknown but were much higher than the $5.58m the startup said was used for computing power. The analysts also said the training costs of the equally-acclaimed R1 model were not disclosed.

Who is behind DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based startup whose controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, based on Chinese corporate records.

Liang’s fund announced in March 2023 on its official WeChat account that it was “starting again”, going beyond trading to concentrate resources on creating a “new and independent research group, to explore the essence of AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence). DeepSeek was created later that year.

ChatGPT makers OpenAI define AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

It is unclear how much High-Flyer has invested in DeepSeek. High-Flyer has an office located in the same building as DeepSeek, and it also owns patents related to chip clusters used to train AI models, according to Chinese corporate records.

High-Flyer’s AI unit said on its official WeChat account in July 2022 that it owns and operates a cluster of 10,000 A100 chips.

How does Beijing view DeepSeek?

DeepSeek‘s success has already been noticed in China’s top political circles. On January 20, the day DeepSeek-R1 was released to the public, founder Liang attended a closed-door symposium for businessman and experts hosted by Chinese premier Li Qiang, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Liang’s presence at the gathering is potentially a sign that DeepSeek‘s success could be important to Beijing’s policy goal of overcoming Washington’s export controls and achieving self-sufficiency in strategic industries like AI.

A similar symposium last year was attended by Baidu CEO Robin Li.

This Data Privacy Day brings with it the sense of being at a crucial crossroads, particularly since generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) invaded our daily life.

At the heart of data privacy is security, they are intertwined – you can’t have privacy without safeguarding it.

Data is the lifeblood that decisions are made on – it fuels innovation in the cloud, but the volume and complexity in hybrid and multi-cloud environments make it difficult to secure. Siloed data security solutions produce many critical alerts, but how do security teams know if those risks should take priority over other exposures like an over-privileged virtual machine or a workload with a severe CVE? If everything is “critical”, nothing is, and security teams are left guessing where they should direct their remediation efforts.

Protecting data in public cloud environments starts with answering three seemingly simple security questions:

• What type of data do I have in the cloud? How is it classified? Is it sensitive?
• Where is my sensitive data in the cloud? Who has access?
• What are the risks to my cloud data?

AI muddying the waters

With data at the heart of everything, it would be amiss not to mention the potential disruption AI is driving an ever-increasing volume and variety of data stored in the cloud, adding another layer of risk.

As AI applications become more sophisticated, they require more data to learn and function effectively. For organisations, controlling AI deployment usage while also identifying vulnerabilities within AI tools and AI development packages, this is yet another headache for the security team to worry about.

Together, this creates a virtuous cycle — the more data stored and used the greater the range of AI use cases, which attracts even more users. But with each new user, data type and storage solution, the cloud attack surface expands.

In addition, threat actors are starting to harness AI to write malware for ransomware attacks. Discovered by CheckPoint, FunkSec is one such group that is believed to use AI-assisted malware development. The danger is that this could see inexperienced actors able to spin up and refine tools quickly to launch attacks.

With ransomware, we’ve seen malicious actors get increasingly aggressive with their threats. Ten years ago a ransomware attack was really obvious. Today these attacks are less obvious and can go undetected for a few weeks as threat actors look to obfuscate their presence as they creep around and steal data.

Once they’ve extracted the information it’s out of your control. With some governments looking to ban ransomware payments, it could mean that they lay incendiaries, threatening to destroy the data which could leave an organisation unable to function.

Data risks: When things go wrong

While there are many cloud exposures to manage, data risks aren’t something to ignore. Whether it’s a breach of customer information, financial records, or intellectual property, unauthorised access to data can have severe regulatory and reputational consequences. It can lead to mistrust and brand damage externally, while internally there is increased scrutiny from the board who are questioning the organisation’s security posture. If there’s not, there should be!

The cloud’s unique challenges and opportunities for data and AI make it crucial for organisations to address the full spectrum of security responsibilities that accompany collecting, storing and using data. These responsibilities include automatically and continuously scanning data assets, discovering and monitoring sensitive data and alerting on any potential risk.

Data security posture management (DSPM) is a set of ongoing processes and technologies that provides visibility into where sensitive data is stored, who has access to it, and how it’s being used across an organisation’s systems, providing analysis of the overall security posture around data itself, rather than just the infrastructure hosting it.

Cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) solutions replace a patchwork of siloed products that often cause more problems than they solve, such as multiple false positives and excessive alerts. Those individual products usually provide only partial coverage and often create overhead and friction with the products they’re supposed to work with.

Most importantly, CNAPPs allow businesses to monitor the health of cloud native applications as a whole rather than individually monitoring cloud infrastructure and application security.

When DSPM is integrated into CNAPP it empowers the security team to obtain actionable data context that better prioritises risks and reduces the organisation’s exposure to customer data breaches and the compromise of AI resources and intellectual property.

This Data Privacy Day, every organisation must take action to protect the data it relies upon to function and that it’s trusted to protect, wherever it resides.

Security teams need a comprehensive view of their cloud data and the risks associated with it, allowing them to know where they’re exposed and take action to close those critical risks.”

The writer is the VP, Middle East & North Africa at Tenable.

Read: How governments can deal with data sovereignty

Charging an electric vehicle (EV) on the go in Saudi Arabia is poised to become easier, thanks to a landmark partnership announced this week.

The Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Company (EVIQ) — a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) — has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility, the local representative of Chinese EV powerhouse BYD.

The collaboration aims to accelerate EV adoption in Saudi Arabia by integrating EVIQ’s expertise in fast-charging infrastructure with BYD’s expanding customer base.

In 2024, BYD sold 4.27 million new energy vehicles (NEVs) across the globe, surpassing Tesla to become the world’s largest EV carmaker.

Regionally, BYD is also gaining traction, with over 1,000 of its vehicles sold in the UAE last year, according to Hasan Nergiz, managing director of Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility Company.

This new partnership in Saudi Arabia is expected to further BYD’s foothold in the Kingdom. Plans include deploying high-speed public charging stations at BYD Al-Futtaim locations nationwide, along with tailored charging packages for BYD owners.

The agreement aligns with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which aims to ensure 30 per cent of vehicles on Riyadh’s roads are electric by the end of the decade.

“Our partnership with BYD Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility marks a significant milestone in transforming Saudi Arabia’s transportation landscape,” said Mohammad Gazzaz, CEO of EVIQ.

“By combining our expertise in fast-charging infrastructure with BYD’s electric mobility innovations, we aim to deliver an unparalleled EV charging experience, contributing to the Kingdom’s sustainability goals and Vision 2030 agenda.”

A recent PwC emobility outlook report highlights that Saudi Arabia has committed $39bn to building an EV ecosystem, including $18bn for EV manufacturing, $9bn for batteries, and $12bn for semiconductors. These investments are projected to attract $150m in foreign direct investment, add $8bn to GDP by 2034, and create over 30,000 jobs.

EVIQ is at the forefront of this transition, with plans to install more than 5,000 chargers across the Kingdom by 2030. Its Riyadh-based R&D facility, the first of its kind in the region, will play a key role in testing and refining technologies for the local market.

Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility, part of the Al-Futtaim Group, is optimistic about the partnership’s potential.

“Strategic collaborations like this are key to shaping a greener, more sustainable future for Saudi Arabia,” said Badr Khojandi, general manager of BYD KSA.

“Together, we aim to empower EV adoption with accessible, efficient, and high-quality charging solutions across the Kingdom.”