The Digital Cooperation Organization, the multilateral body headquartered in Riyadh, has approved eight countries for full membership: Albania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Zambia, with Tajikistan admitted as an associate member. Once accession formalities are complete, the organization will span 24 member states and roughly 980 million people, about 12 percent of the world’s population. A body launched from Riyadh in 2020 with five founding members has grown almost fivefold in six years, and it has done so without lending a riyal. What it offers instead is coordination: a shared position in the negotiations that will decide how data, artificial intelligence and digital trade are governed.
Deemah Al-Yahya, the Saudi technologist serving as the organization’s first secretary-general, put the recruiting pitch plainly: countries are joining, she said, because “the rules of the digital economy on data, artificial intelligence and cross-border trade are being written now.” The line rewards a careful reading. Rules written now harden into standards later, and standards are expensive to renegotiate. A country of ten or forty million people has little leverage over how platform taxation or cross-border data flows are settled. Twenty-four of them, voting as a caucus, have more.
The membership list is the strategy. None of the eight incoming members is a digital superpower, and that is the point: the organization aggregates mid-sized markets that would otherwise take rules written in Washington, Brussels or Beijing as given. The approvals also mark the organization’s first reach into Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Western Balkans, while Kenya and Zambia deepen an African presence that already ran from Morocco to Nigeria. Membership now traces the corridors along which Saudi trade and investment increasingly move.
For the Kingdom, the return on hosting is structural rather than financial. Institutions domiciled in Riyadh keep their agendas, their secretariats and their convening calendars there, and influence of that kind compounds without further spending. The same week the organization announced its expansion, the Royal Commission for Riyadh City approved a Digital Innovation District intended to place the capital among the world’s leading technology hubs. The two moves are halves of one position: the district recruits the companies, the organization convenes the governments those companies must answer to.
Two of the incoming members carry a second meaning. Syria and Lebanon are joining a Riyadh-based institution in the same season that Saudi ministries signed transport memorandums in Damascus and Saudi firms took positions at the Damascus International Fair. Economic re-engagement with the Levant is usually measured in agreements and capital; membership in a Saudi-convened organization institutionalizes it, which is harder to reverse.
What is confirmed so far is approval, not accession. Each of the eight must sign the organization’s charter and ratify it domestically before taking a seat, and associate membership of the kind granted to Tajikistan carries participation rights rather than a vote. The organization’s harder test is one this publication has raised before: converting ministerial forums into instruments that change national policy. Its 2025 to 2028 agenda, which runs through AI governance, cross-border data flows and digital skills, is where that conversion would show.
Three things are worth watching. The pace of ratification will show how much of the approved expansion becomes real membership, and how quickly. The agenda will show whether the larger bloc produces binding frameworks or communiques. And the next round of applicants will show whether 24 members is a plateau or a waypoint. Al-Yahya described the goal as building the capacity to set terms together rather than asking for better ones. The size of the table is now settled for a while; what gets signed at it is the number to follow.