Microsoft Saudi data centre to come onstream

16 January 2025

US-headquartered technology firm Microsoft’s data centre infrastructure in Saudi Arabia is expected to start operations in 2026, according to a source familiar with the project.

The so-called availability zones for Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, comprise data centres located in three sites.

Microsoft said in December that construction works on those three sites had been completed.

MEED understands that each of the three Azure availability zones features independent power, cooling and networking infrastructure. 

The US tech firm signed a multi-year agreement to invest $2.1bn to build data centres comprising a “cloud region” catering to Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East region in 2023.

In September last year, the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and Microsoft announced the availability of its Allam large-language model (LLM) on Microsoft Azure.

Developed by SDAIA’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), the Allam-2 7B Arabic language technology is an autoregressive transformer-based model designed to facilitate natural language understanding in both Arabic and English. 

Data centre construction boom

The Middle East data centre market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by increased digital adoption and internet access. The region’s data centre construction market is projected to reach $4.39bn by 2029, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.99%. 

According to GlobalData, total investment in data centres reached $70.6bn in 2024 and is projected to grow by 5% to $74.3bn in 2025.

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Jennifer Aguinaldo
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