Saudi Arabia announced major LEAP 2026 AI investments totaling more than $15 billion on the opening day of the fifth edition of the global technology conference in Riyadh. The financial commitments focus on computing capacity, data center infrastructure, and sovereign cloud systems, according to جريدة الجزيرة.
Expansion of Data Centers and Computing Capacity
The announcements were led by Saudi artificial intelligence company HUMAIN through a series of infrastructure agreements. The company expanded its partnership with AMD to build the initial phase of AI infrastructure with 250 megawatts of capacity over two to three years, beginning with an initial deployment of 25 megawatts alongside an AI in a Box solution.
In addition, HUMAIN partnered with stc Group to build proprietary data centers in Saudi Arabia starting at 250 megawatts, with plans to expand toward 1 gigawatt. Furthermore, the company teamed up with DataVolt to build 100 megawatts within an AI data center project in Oxagon at NEOM, which has a total planned capacity of 360 megawatts.
Scale of LEAP 2026 AI Investments
The LEAP 2026 AI investments also include cloud infrastructure deployments across international hardware platforms. HUMAIN partnered with Together AI for 55 megawatts of compute capacity and a new 250-megawatt data center in the Kingdom. Meanwhile, HUMAIN launched an AI cloud running on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra architecture for enterprise and government clients in the local market.
AWS and HUMAIN agreed to provide up to 50 megawatts of capacity by 2028, integrating HUMAIN Fabric into AWS and offering the Allam model on Amazon Bedrock. Consequently, these partnerships expand the kingdom’s access to modern computing hardware and cloud capabilities.
“The Kingdom has established a global model for turning technical ambitions and commitments into practical achievements on the ground.”
Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology
Workforce Expansion and Sector Milestones
Minister Alswaha noted that the Saudi digital economy recorded a growth rate of 70 percent, with the national technology workforce reaching approximately 411,000 professionals. Female participation in the Saudi technology sector reached between 35 and 36 percent, which places the nation first among G20 members in this metric. Additionally, the Kingdom now counts nine tech unicorns operating within its business sector.
Long-Term Digital Infrastructure Targets
Looking ahead toward 2030, Saudi Arabia targets more than 20 operational subsea telecom cables reaching 3 billion people with latency under 30 milliseconds. The strategic roadmap also aims for more than 12 gigawatts of computing capacity across 80 square kilometers of dedicated land. These combined LEAP 2026 AI investments reinforce the national transition toward an intelligence-driven economic model.
