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Saudi Arabia attracts $14.9bn in tech investments

11 February 2025

International and local companies have pledged at least $14.9bn-worth of investments in Saudi Arabia at the ongoing Leap technology conference in Riyadh, according to the Saudi Press Agency and other local media reports.

A team comprising homegrown data centre operator DataVolt, along with Saudi gigaproject developer Neom, announced a plan to develop a 1.5GW data centre facility in the kingdom's Oxagon industrial cluster.

The renewable energy-powered, net-zero data centre project will require an investment of $5bn and is expected to be operational by 2028.

Another local firm, Alfanar Company, announced a $1.4bn investment to develop four data centres with a total capacity of 88MW.

Riyadh-headquartered telecommunications firm Mobily also committed $905m to develop key projects, including submarine cable networks and advanced data centres.

US-based Zoom pledged $75m to drive artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and establish new data centres to strengthen support for tech enterprises and government entities.

Saudi Arabia Railways also announced a $51m investment in a private fibre optic network to enhance digital connectivity and expand the country's communications infrastructure.

Germany-based broadband services provider SkyFive also promised to invest $100m in non-terrestrial network services in the kingdom.

The other major planned investments announced during the fourth edition of the annual tech event in Riyadh include a $1.5bn pledge by Silicon Valley-based Groq, a company that develops language processing units (LPU). Groq said it plans to build the world's largest AI inference node in Saudi Arabia.

Not to be confused with Grok, a generative language developed by Elon Musk-headed xAI, Groq's LPU recently hit a record speed of 534 tokens a second, a token being the unit of data that is processed by algorithms.

Hong Kong-headquartered Lenovo Group also pledged $2bn towards establishing advanced manufacturing and data centre facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Lenovo and Alat Enate, part of Saudi sovereign wealth vehicle the Public Investment Fund (PIF), first announced this plan in May 2024, when Lenovo said it planned to issue $2bn-worth of zero-coupon convertible bonds to Saudi Arabia's Alat, the $100bn platform that aims to transform the kingdom into a global hub for electronics and advanced industries. 

UAE-based GulfData Hub and US-headquartered private equity firm KKR also disclosed plans to build 300MW data centre facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Another US-based tech firm, Databricks, announced a plan to invest $300m in building a full platform-as-a-service facility in Saudi Arabia.

SambaNova, of Palo Alto, California, will also invest $140m in an advanced AI infrastructure to enable a large-language model (LLM)-as-a-service.

US semiconductor company Qualcomm and the Saudi Data & Artificial Intelligence Authority also launched Allam AI PC, a first-of-its-kind, "fully integrated AI personal computer with on-device AI and seamless hybrid AI cloud access".

US-based Google said it will invest in digital infrastructure for AI, while Beijing-headquartered Alibaba launched a so-called empowerment programme in Saudi Arabia with the introduction of its Qwen LLM, an advanced AI model.

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