Day two of Leap: Homegrown data centers, foreign clouds, and money moving both ways

The compute buildout found its customers at Leap yesterday. Roughly USD 2.5 bn in commitments ran in both directions: Saudi firms put more than USD 2 bn into new capacity, while Aramco, the Tourism Ministry, and the education sector signed up to use it. Foreign vendors, meanwhile, spent the day proving they’re here to stay with licenses, R&D centers, and localized manufacturing.

Homegrown money piles into data centers

• Al Moammar Information Systems (MIS) said it will spend USD 1.2 bn expanding its data centers to 192 MW of total capacity;
• NHC Innovation will invest USD 880 mn in data centers at Khuzam Digital Valley, targeting 65 MW by 2033;
• Zain KSA signed a non-binding MoU with DataVolt to explore building data centers in the Kingdom, capacity it would share with government, enterprise, and cloud providers.

Foreign cloud plants local flags

• Mobily and ByteDance’s BytePlus will jointly put in more than USD 150 mn to launch BytePlus cloud services in the Kingdom;
• India’s Zoho will invest SAR 500 mn to expand its Riyadh office and hire Saudi talent;
• China's Tencent Cloud secured a Saudi operating license, cleared to serve government bodies and financial institutions, and will build on the c. USD 150 mn it has invested so far. It struck six to eight infrastructure and AI agreements at the show, including migrating Trucker’s systems to its local cloud;
• And Humain worked the domestic side, investing in and partnering with Arabic.AI and Tarjama to build Arabic translation and document-intelligence tools. The tools target Saudi enterprises first — contracts, tenders, regulatory filings, and digitizing legacy archives;
• Some Saudi money heads the other way: Vision Invest and the Africa Finance Corporation are leading a USD 300 mn strategic investment in WIOCC to expand digital infrastructure and connectivity across African markets.

Oil, tourism, and schools line up as buyers

• Aramco and Aramco Digital partnered with Sony’s semiconductor unit to develop an industrial-AI model for predictive maintenance;
• The Tourism Ministry and Saudi Accenture partnered to pilot AI across the sector — visitor-flow management, multilingual assistants, VR — and build tourism-specific language models;
• Solutions by stc signed a five-year revenue-sharing agreement with Tatweer for Education Technologies to develop Madaris, its digital platform for private schools, investors, parents, and students.

Made in Saudi push widens

• Nokia opened a Riyadh R&D center for AI network-automation software — the tools that let networks tune themselves and cut power draw — and will use it to work on 6G and Made in Saudi software for its customers;
• HPE stretched its own Made in Saudi program from hardware to fully localized solutions, and opened a Saudi Innovation Center with Intel to back AI startups and local talent.

And the spillover reaches the startups

Saudi climate-tech startup Remedium raised USD 1.5 mn in a pre-seed round, led by Kaltaire Investments, for a platform that helps companies measure and cut their carbon footprint. It will spend the round building out AI capabilities — risk modeling, forecasting, automated reporting — and expanding local compute to keep client data in-Kingdom.

We said this would happen: A senior venture investor told us before the show kicked off that the VC money that pulled back when the war began in March has since recalibrated and was waiting for events like Leap — where investors, founders, and traction converge — to give the backlog of deals a platform and help sentiment rebound alongside it. Keep an eye out for more funding rounds during and after the show.