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Design under way for Saudi gigawatt-scale data centre project

27 February 2025

 

Design work is expected to start imminently for a gigawatt-scale data centre project in Saudi Arabia, which a project sponsor says will be designed and built to meet Tier 4 standards.

Riyadh-based Built Industrial Company, represented by its general manager, Mohamed Naser, and Shaker Consultancy CEO, Ismael Shaker, signed an agreement for the design and construction supervision of the planned data centre in the summer of last year.

According to an industry source, Built Industrial Company is one of the project sponsors. This implies the presence of other partners that may include a government entity or a global hyperscaler, or both.

The planned data centre facility will have multiple locations and could reach or exceed 1GW of IT load capacity, added the source.

According to the US' Uptime Institute, a Tier 4 data centre has several independent and physically isolated systems that act as redundant capacity components and distribution paths, allowing higher fault tolerance when equipment fails or an interruption occurs in the distribution path compared to lower-tier data centre facilities.

Several planned data centre projects in Saudi Arabia entail multiple locations.

In a joint venture with Shanghai-based Lumaotong Group and China Mobile International, Riyadh-headquartered data centre developer ICS Arabia plans to invest a total of $1.9bn across three locations in Saudi Arabia. However, these data centre facilities, known as Desert Dragon, are expected to achieve a Tier 3-level certification.

Related read: GCC’s top five data centre projects.

In March 2024, US-headquartered Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched a plan for a new AWS Region in Saudi Arabia in 2026 as part of its long-term commitment to invest more than $5.3bn in the kingdom.

The planned AWS Region in Saudi Arabia will comprise three availability zones, or a data centre infrastructure in separate and distinct locations “far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications”.

In May 2023, Saudi sovereign vehicle, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), also teamed up with US-based infrastructure investor and asset manager DigitalBridge to develop data centres and related digital infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and across the GCC states.

The new partnership aims to support the growth of the digital economy in Saudi Arabia and the GCC region. They said the partnership will initially prioritise investments in the data centre sector and then explore other segments of digital infrastructure in the future, including macro towers, fibre, small cell and edge infrastructure.

DataVolt is also planning several data centre projects in Saudi Arabia, including a 1.5GW renewable energy-powered facility in Oxagon, Neom's industrial cluster. The project's initial phase is expected to require $5bn of investment.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo

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