Saudi Arabia Puts $15 Billion on the Table to Win the Gulf's AI Race

This week, a San Francisco AI cloud company called Together AI committed to a $5 billion-per-year compute run-rate in Saudi Arabia. Elon Musk's xAI said it would build its first data center outside the United States in the kingdom, starting at 50 megawatts before scaling to 500. Amazon's cloud unit, AWS, expanded a partnership with HUMAIN, the Saudi state-backed AI vehicle, to deliver up to 50 megawatts in the kingdom's first "AI Zone" by 2028. Riyadh's flagship tech conference, LEAP, opened with 1,800 exhibitor brands and $15 billion in announced deals. The package anchors a state-backed AI vehicle called HUMAIN and pits the kingdom against the UAE for the Gulf's AI hub.

LEAP 2026 was delayed four months by the Iran war. That context matters. Senior leaders from NVIDIA, Google, Roblox, Uber, Meta, Lenovo, Nokia, and Luma AI still attended despite the geopolitical instability. The $15 billion figure is real money, but it is also a political claim. Saudi Arabia is selling the package as proof that the kingdom can move capital and capacity at a scale the rest of the region cannot match.

HUMAIN, the Saudi state's central AI infrastructure arm, channels multiple hyperscaler and startup commitments under a single state-backed roof, per Zawya's coverage of the LEAP 2026 partnerships. The most concrete example: Together AI's commitment, announced alongside HUMAIN, would put a 250-megawatt AI data center in the kingdom, with the parties projecting over $5 billion in gross annualized revenue in its first year, a stated projection rather than a booked outcome. To put that in scale: 250 megawatts is the kind of compute footprint that, until now, only lived in the largest U.S. cloud regions. xAI's planned build, scaling to 500 megawatts, would land in the same range. AWS's 50-megawatt commitment, by comparison, is the floor of the package.

Saudi Arabia is competing most directly with the UAE, which has spent the last two years building its own AI hub through partnerships anchored by G42, an Abu Dhabi-based AI company, and deals with Microsoft and others. The kingdom frames the LEAP 2026 package as a counter to that effort. Riyadh's stated bet is that volume, with 1,800 exhibitor brands across AI, cloud, cybersecurity, smart cities, fintech, healthcare, space, gaming, and mobility, plus a single chokepoint in HUMAIN, will outflank the UAE's approach. The kingdom's digital economy has grown 69% since LEAP launched in 2022, from $118 billion to $199 billion, per the Communications and Information Technology Ministry. Dealroom also flags an Arabic-language AI model in the LEAP 2026 bundle, a smaller signal of where Saudi Arabia wants sovereign capability.

The Together AI figure is a projection from the parties, not a realized outcome, and the same caveat applies across the broader package. The megawatt totals will also have to survive contact with grid power, talent, and paying customers, a question the announcements do not answer. The UAE's response, whether it consolidates around G42 or folds, will determine whether the announced megawatt capacity becomes the Gulf's actual AI center of gravity.

Together AI says the 250-megawatt build starts immediately, with revenue projected to follow within the first year. Power-on is the next checkpoint.