Yousef Barkawie, Partner in Engineering, AI & Data at Deloitte Middle East, shares insights on how the Silicon-to-Service (S2S) platform enables AI sovereignty and accelerates digital transformation across critical sectors.
Dubai — Deloitte has unveiled the regional launch of its Silicon-to-Service (S2S) AI offering, powered by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA, marking a strategic milestone in advancing AI adoption across the Middle East. Yousef Barkawie, Partner in Engineering, AI & Data at Deloitte Middle East, spoke to Tahawultech.com about how this platform brings together Dell’s PowerEdge XE9 servers, PowerScale storage, and NVIDIA’s Blackwell accelerated computing platform to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performance AI infrastructure.
Designed to empower both public and private sector organisations, S2S supports mission-critical use cases such as AI agents that enhance human productivity, cyber risk identification, and real-time analysis of large datasets across sectors like government, finance, healthcare, and energy. By bringing this innovation to the region, Deloitte reinforces its commitment to helping organisations build resilient, sovereign, and future-ready AI ecosystems.
Interview Excerpts:
The Silicon-2-Service offering marks a major milestone for Deloitte in the region. What inspired this expansion into the Middle East, and how does it align with regional AI and digital transformation priorities?
The topic of sovereignty has become a critical aspect of AI deployments across geographies – particularly in our region where we are seeing a concerted drive to preserve sovereignty over critical assets such as data. The concept behind Silicon-2-Service is all about creating an ‘AI factory’ which enables Deloitte clients, across both the public and private sectors, to securely deploy AI capabilities at scale while upholding sovereignty. Whether you’re a bank or a government entity, S2S enables you to take control of your most valuable assets without having to heavily depend on third parties.
Could you elaborate on the core capabilities of S2S – particularly the AI agents designed to enhance human productivity, manage cyber risks, and analyse large datasets across critical sectors?
With S2S, Deloitte clients can rapidly and securely manage the entire AI lifecycle across installation, deployment, training, management and operations. From model selection, governance, and control to the generation and production stage, our clients leverage their own localised infrastructure to complete tasks such as the creation of AI agents seamlessly. This eliminates the need to manage the complexities of technology installation that a typical AI implementation would require.
Deloitte’s S2S offering is powered by Dell Technologies and NVIDIA. How do these technology integrations strengthen S2S’s ability to deliver scalable, mission-critical AI solutions?
The combination of NVIDIA’s world-class GPUs, Dell’s robust hardware infrastructure, and Deloitte’s IP and capability to seamlessly integrate these elements enables us to deliver to our clients a manageable, scalable, high-performing compute environment to accommodate the most critical AI workloads.
As organisations accelerate AI adoption, what role does Deloitte see itself playing in ensuring responsible, ethical, and sustainable AI deployment through the S2S ecosystem?
Deloitte supports clients across the entire value chain of AI – from strategy to visioning to governance controls to security, as well as implementation, change management, and operations. We essentially utilise AI and other technologies in combination to help organisations solve their most complex business challenges.