Saudi secures new compute offtakers and builders at LEAP

Compute, Arabic models, and fundraises — these were the main three concrete themes that dominated the fifth edition of LEAP, which closed in Riyadh yesterday after being pushed from April to August due to the US-Israel-Iran war.

The show shifted from selling ambition to selling capacity. Communications and Information Technology Minister Abdullah Alswaha opened LEAP telling the audience the digital economy has grown 69% since 2022, from USD 118 bn to USD 199 bn. The pitch at previous editions was that Saudi wanted to be a compute hub. The pitch this year was that it already is one, and that investors — American, Chinese, Korean, Indian — were signing up to not just build new capacity, but also buy capacity that is either operational now or planned through 2030.

New and old

American players are following through on prior commitments: Amazon Web Services confirmed the largest US commitment of the show. Its first USD 5.3 bn Saudi cloud region is on track to launch in December. Alongside it, AWS and Humain agreed to make up to 50 MW of capacity available in the Kingdom’s first AI Zone by 2028, provisioned with AWS Trainium chips and Nvidia infrastructure. AMD, Cisco, and Humain JV separately put live the largest AMD inference cluster outside the United States, powered by 13k Instinct MI355X GPUs running on Cisco Silicon One networking — the first step in a 250 MW planned capacity by 2027 and a 1 GW target by 2030.

And the Riyadh buildout is already pulling new US firms into Riyadh. San Francisco-based Together AI committed with Humain to a 250 MW facility, and data-management firm NetApp is doubling its Saudi sales team from three to six and grew its solutions engineering team from two to four ahead of a regional headquarters launch in Riyadh, Senior Solutions Engineering Manager for Middle East and Africa Walid Issa told EnterpriseAM on the sidelines of the show.

Saudi firms also committed to their own data-center buildouts, including Humain launching its AI Cloud with 1.1 MW capacity, to be scaled to 35.1 MW next year, while NHC Innovation’s Khuzam Digital Valley is targeting 65 MW of scalable capacity by 2033. Al Moammar Investment Systems will invest USD 1.2 bn to expand its data centers to 192 MW of total operational capacity and Alfanar committed USD 150 mn to localize data-center component manufacturing.

But perhaps the most interesting development is that Chinese and Korean players are now joining the compute foray. Mobily and BytePlus — the enterprise arm of ByteDance — announced a joint investment of more than USD 150 mn to launch BytePlus’ first public cloud region in the Middle East and Africa, built on Mobily’s Saudi data-center infrastructure and targeting media, AI, and gaming workloads. 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 in the market. Meanwhile, Korea’s Naver Innovation and China’s Byteplus announced they will be the first two anchor customers to the USD 3.3 bn Khuzam Digital Valley project, announced during LEAP by homegrown NHC Innovation.

Arabic language models make a return

Humain used LEAP to launch its first own-branded Arabic-language AI products. The PIF-owned firm unveiled HUMAIN M3, an open-weights Arabic language model trained on more than one trillion Arabic tokens, alongside HUMAIN Voice, a conversational AI platform covering Saudi, Maghrebi, Egyptian, and Levantine Arabic dialects. HUMAIN also made a strategic investment in Dubai-based Arabic-language enterprise AI platform Arabic.AI and entered a partnership with Arabic. AI and its sister firm Tarjama to expand Arabic and multilingual AI across Saudi Arabia and international markets.

AND- AWS is integrating Humain’s Arabic LLM (Allam) into Amazon Bedrock. The move would allow customers of AWS to integrate Allam alongside other foundational models.

ALSO- Visual intelligence outfit Luma AI will roll out a “fully native” Arabic-language interface for its Luma Agents AI platform later this year in partnership with Humain, covering navigation, menus, and workflow tools, according to a press release. The platform already supports Arabic-language prompts and generates Arabic-language creative outputs, but the new update is premised on being “fully native,” allowing the workflow to operate fully in Arabic.