Day one of Leap: Humain wires Saudi into the full AI stack

Leap is back, and Humain wasted no time. On day one of the war-delayed fifth edition of Leap, PIF’s AI arm anchored more than USD 15 bn in launches and agreements, stitching itself into every layer of the stack, from power and data centers to models and hardware. The agreement value is on track to exceed last year’s USD 14.9 bn, Communications Minister Abdullah Alswaha said.

REMEMBER- The show had been pushed back months past its usual slot after war broke out in the region in March. Its opening today is the first sign that the events calendar, and the risk appetite that travels with it, is back.

Most of day one was a power grab, denominated in megawatts.

• AMD and Humain expanded their partnership to build a 250-MW first phase (from an initial 25 MW) of a 1-GW build-out with Cisco by 2030, under a collaboration worth up to USD 10 bn;
• Telco STC will host Humain-owned data centers scaling from 250 MW toward 1 GW;
• Amazon Web Services will add up to 50 MW of Humain capacity by 2028, offer its cloud customers Humain’s Fabric compute and Arabic Allam model, and open its first Saudi region by December;
• US infrastructure firm Together AI signed a 250-MW agreement with Humain worth north of USD 5 bn in annualized revenue.

There were signs of execution:

• PIF’s Humain and Saudi infrastructure developer DataVolt broke ground in Oxagon, Neom’s industrial city on the Red Sea, on 100 MW of a 360-MW AI data center — the first phase of a planned 1.5-GW campus, with initial capacity due in 2028;
• Separately, Humain has switched on an AI cloud running Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra platform and begun operating local accelerated-compute infrastructure for government and business.

And customers are moving onto the stack:

• Adobe will become Humain’s first foreign tenant, running its regional AI data-labeling workloads on Humain’s locally hosted, Qualcomm-accelerated compute;
• Oilfield-services giant SLB will pair Humain Fabric with its own Lumi data platform and agent-based tools to build an AI stack for large-scale energy operations, aiming the new compute at oil and gas;
• Applied Intuition and Humain are doing the same on the road, aiming to deploy thousands of autonomous trucks on Saudi freight routes by 2030, later widening to robotaxis, ports, and mining.

On the device front:

• Qualcomm and Humain unveiled Horizon Ultra, an AI PC on the Snapdragon X2 Elite processor that runs models on the device. It reaches enterprise buyers on 20 September, with a Humain-built operating system due in 2027;
• Microsoft and Humain bundled the Humain ONE assistant with 365 Copilot and launched a Windows-based Humain AI PC. Microsoft plans to open its own Saudi cloud region in November;
• Lenovo unveiled the first locally manufactured laptop coming off a new Riyadh line built with PIF’s ALAT that is meant to produce the full device portfolio, from PCs to Motorola phones and servers. Mass production is set for late 2026.

And the widest reach comes last: Adobe, Humain, and MCIT will give 27 mn+ residents a free year of Firefly and Express, alongside a Saudi-focused Arabic image model.