Oman's digital economy is now everybody's business

Five years ago the National Programme for Digital Economy set out to put government online, connect the country and prepare the ground. On October 22, as the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology launched the second phase, the ground was ready for the next stage. Oman has climbed from 48th to 22nd on the UN telecommunications infrastructure index, its digital resilience is supported by twenty submarine cables land on our coast, mobile broadband reaches 99 per cent of the population, and Omanisation in technology occupations has risen from 50 to 72 per cent since 2022.
A 2026 survey by the National Centre for Statistics and Information now puts the digital economy, broadly measured, at 9 per cent of GDP, equivalent to roughly RO 3.8 billion when applied to an economy of around RO 42 billion. However, the published launch announcement does not explain how this survey measure relates to the programme’s narrower RO 1.5 billion target for 2030. That is a foundation, and foundations are the slow part of any build.
Those foundations were not laid by chance. His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik chaired the Main Committee of Oman Vision 2040 before his accession, made digital transformation a priority of the Renewed Renaissance, and carries the agenda personally into Oman's partnerships abroad.
In the same week that Phase Two was launched in Muscat, His Majesty was in London on the first state visit by a Sultan of Oman to the United Kingdom since 1982, and much of what was signed there was digital: a sovereign investment partnership between the Oman Investment Authority and the UK Office for Investment; a memorandum between the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology and the UK-founded investor Yamna for an AI data centre in Salalah within the Oman Digital Triangle, with a first phase expected to exceed £1 billion; a declaration of intent on space cooperation; and a British Council programme bringing artificial intelligence into Omani classrooms. When the Head of State carries the digital economy into a state visit, the direction is settled at the very top. The open question is who builds on it.
What changes in Phase Two is the owner of the next step. Phase One was, by design, a government programme, and succeeded as one. Phase Two describes itself as the digitalisation of economic sectors: 65 per cent of its 84 initiatives aim at firms and sectors, with a target of 80 per cent digital maturity across the economy by 2030. The Eleventh Five-Year Plan, which carries Oman Vision 2040 through this decade, asks the digital economy to grow 10.8 per cent a year, the highest rate it sets for any named sector, while lifting the private sector to 56 per cent of GDP. The state has signed its part. The second signature belongs to the private sector, and the numbers show why.
Phase Two adds a national cloud, more cable landings and three green AI data-centre zones with up to 500 megawatts of capacity, roughly 7 per cent of the main grid's 7,503 megawatt peak in 2024. An Arizton market study published through ResearchAndMarkets estimates data-centre construction costs in Oman at eight to nine million dollars per megawatt, which would imply a theoretical construction cost of $4 billion to $4.5 billion for 500 megawatts at those rates.
This is an indicative estimate, not a confirmed investment commitment, and it is not directly comparable with the programme's RO 300 million technology-investment target. Nevertheless, it illustrates the scale of the opportunity for private and foreign operators. Operators build against anchor tenants; Gulf Data Hub has already tied its 32 megawatt plan to demand materialising. The launch spoke of a multiplier of around five rials for every rial spent on digital. A multiplier rewards what stays at home: an Omani bank, port or factory that runs its workloads on Omani power turns reserved megawatts into revenue.
Two clarifications would help investors act. The first is measurement. The programme document records today's contribution at RO 0.8 billion, with RO 1.5 billion as the 2030 target. That is the narrow measure, the sector that produces digital goods and services; the 9 per cent counts digital activity embedded across the whole economy.
Because the published survey announcement does not yet set out the methodology or reconcile these figures, publishing both as annual series would let the ministry report the broader estimate while tracking progress against the sharper, more demanding target: RO 0.8 billion to RO 1.5 billion in five years means about 13.4 per cent growth a year, above even the Plan's RO 10.8 billion.
The second is the word that runs through the document: sovereignty. As ownership it means an Omani balance sheet behind the asset; as jurisdiction, data residency and a Maal card that reduces reliance on Visa and Mastercard; as capability, Omanis who design what the rack contains. Each carries a different opportunity for Omani firms; the third holds the lasting value. The IMF's 2025 assessment cited advanced ICT skills among about 8 per cent of individuals, based on data from 2020–21, while research and development spending stood at 0.3 per cent of GDP. Those are the numbers Phase Two's talent initiatives exist to move.
For a chief executive in Suhar or Salalah, the practical reading is that Phase Two is built on instruments a firm must reach for. Artificial intelligence for Omani factories, local value-added weighting in government technology procurement, the Central Bank's sandbox, the Makeen+ freelance pool and the governorate transformation centres are all designed to be pulled, not pushed. The 80 per cent maturity target is a target for boards. The five technology listings the programme hopes to see on the Muscat Stock Exchange by 2030 will come from companies that treat digital as a business model rather than an IT budget. Three steps would help. A private co-chair for each of the eight executive programmes would seat the business community at the delivery table. An anchor-tenant compact, in which the largest Omani companies commit workloads to the national cloud and the new zones, would turn capacity into contracts. And publishing the method behind the matrix that ranks the programmes by economic contribution would let firms use it as a map of where they fit.
Three signals will show whether the handover is under way. The first is the NCSI series reporting narrow and broad measures side by side. The second is a named, paying tenant for the first hundred megawatts. The third is the private share of the RO 300 million, and whether 3,000 digital jobs a year, 6 per cent of the Plan's annual private-sector target, are created by firms rather than contracted by government. If by the programme's 2028 midpoint private money is leading, the question this column raises will have answered itself.
One line from the launch stays with me: companies are the nerve of the economy. A nerve is defined by what it carries. Oman has laid the cable, lit the towers and reserved the megawatts; the slow part is done. Whether these five years become the moment the digital economy turned into Omani business is now a decision for Omani boardrooms, and the best kind of decision to have in front of us..