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Saudi Arabia and Nvidia plan a 5,000-GPU platform

11 September 2024

The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) and US-headquartered AI microprocessor giant Nvidia plan to establish the largest high-performance data centre infrastructure in the Middle East and North Africa region.

The project will expand SDAIA’s existing supercomputing infrastructure in Riyadh.

According to an official statement, the expansion “is planned to integrate Nvidia’s most advanced technologies, including the upcoming Nvidia Blackwell architecture, and is expected to eventually grow to over 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), setting a new benchmark for digital innovation and infrastructure in Saudi Arabia”.

The kingdom is already home to eight of the world’s top 500 most powerful supercomputers globally, most of which are installed at Saudi Aramco. SDAIA’s planned new infrastructure could only increase that number.

Related read: Saudi Arabia asserts AI ambitions

Nvidia and SDAIA also announced at the ongoing Global AI (Gain) summit in Riyadh an agreement to work together to make Allam, a Saudi homegrown Arabic language technology, more accessible to developers.

The firms announced in a statement the integration of “the latest Nvidia technological advancements to enable developers to more easily build and deploy AI applications with the Allam Arabic large-language model (LLM)”.

The collaboration will enable access to Nvidia NeMo, part of the US technology firm’s AI enterprise software platform for large-scale language model training.

It also enables access to Nvidia’s NeMo Guardrails for AI safety, which will provide “developers with a faster, more accessible path to building generative AI applications”.

Related reads:

Photo: Pixabay, for illustrative purposes only

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Jennifer Aguinaldo

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