Meed | Construction to start on $1.9bn Saudi data centres

Construction to start on $1.9bn Saudi data centres

20 September 2024

Riyadh-headquartered data centre developer ICS Arabia has broken ground on the first phase of an 187MW data centre project in Saudi Arabia.

ICS Arabia is developing the project, called Desert Dragon Data Centres, in a joint venture with Shanghai-based Lumaotong Group and China Mobile International.

The first Tier 3, 65MW data centre facility is expected to be launched in Riyadh and become operational in March 2026.

The second phase, a 50MW data centre, will start construction in Jeddah in February 2025 for operations in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The project’s third phase will encompass a 72MW facility, commencing construction in September 2025 in the Dammam and Neom regions.

Over this period, the joint venture plans to invest a total of $1.9bn.

The company, which specialises in the design, build and operation of data centres, said it has completed the design for the cluster of 187MW, Tier 3 and 4 data centres and secured land through the Saudi Authority for Industrial Cities & Technology Zones (Modon).

According to ICS Arabia, the rack capacity of the planned data centres ranges from 2 kilowatts (kW) to 100kW for conventional racks and immersive cooling technologies.

The firm said that the Desert Dragon Data Centres will be “available to global customers, [offering services] from cloud hosting to artificial intelligence”.