NTT DATA acquires Dubai’s Zero&One to scale AWS cloud delivery across the Middle East

NTT DATA has acquired Dubai-headquartered cloud consultancy Zero&One, a move aimed at expanding its cloud services footprint across the Middle East as enterprises accelerate migration, modernisation, and data and AI programmes that increasingly sit on hyperscaler infrastructure.

Zero&One, founded in 2017, is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner operating across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and holds nine AWS competencies, the companies said in the announcement. The press release added that the firm was “one of the first in the region to achieve the AWS Generative AI Competency”, and that it was named AWS’s MENA Consulting Partner of the Year in 2025, alongside additional partner awards at EMEA level.

NTT DATA said the acquisition strengthens its ability to support clients pursuing cloud-first strategies, positioning the combined business to deliver larger and faster programmes that require deeper technical capacity and broader service coverage.

“This acquisition enables us to deliver high-impact solutions and enhance the value we bring to organizations in the Middle East. Zero&One’s expertise strengthens our ability to deliver the speed, scale and technical depth clients need in today’s cloud-first environment,” said Burcak Soydan, Managing Director for the Middle East at NTT DATA.

Zero&One’s CEO described the deal as a step that expands its reach and delivery capacity by pairing regional execution with a larger global platform.

“Joining NTT DATA is the natural next step in our growth journey,” said Ali El Kontar, CEO of Zero&One. “We’ve built our reputation on delivering world-class cloud expertise to organizations across the Middle East. As part of NTT DATA, we can now combine our regional knowledge and AWS specialization with global resources, expanded service offerings and the ability to support clients on an even larger scale. Our teams share a commitment to innovation and client success, making this an ideal partnership”

On services, NTT DATA said the acquisition will broaden what it can deliver across the Middle East and Africa, citing cloud migration, application modernisation, cloud-native development, data analytics and AI solutions as core areas of focus. Zero&One’s positioning in the release centres on cloud-native work spanning application modernisation, cloud operations, AI and machine learning, and data analytics, with customers across sectors including financial services, retail, media and entertainment, healthcare and government.

The announcement also pointed to Saudi Arabia as an anchor market for regional cloud growth, stating that the Kingdom’s cloud services market was valued at $4.77 billion last year and is expected to more than double by the early 2030s, while noting AWS’s plan to launch an AWS Region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026.

NTT DATA described itself as a “$30+ billion” technology services business that serves 75% of the Fortune Global 100 and operates in more than 70 countries, with the deal intended to strengthen delivery capacity as regional clients pursue larger, more complex cloud transformations. The companies did not disclose financial terms.

For the region, the strategic significance is less about one more acquisition headline and more about what it signals in the cloud services stack: as hyperscalers expand local infrastructure and governments push national digital strategies, large enterprise buyers are shifting from one-off cloud projects to multi-year operating models that demand continuous optimisation, security-by-design, and application modernisation that can keep pace with AI adoption, and that shift tends to reward providers that can combine on-the-ground execution with global delivery depth.

Regional cloud spending is starting to flow to a smaller number of providers that can prove they have the right certifications, deep skills, and enough people to deliver big projects safely.

As Zero&One is a top-tier AWS partner and NTT DATA has global scale, the combined company is better positioned to win larger, higher-stakes cloud and AI transformation deals across the Gulf and the wider Middle East and Africa - especially as companies move from “pilot projects” to mission-critical cloud operations.