LEAP 2026: Four rival chipmakers agreed to build Saudi Arabia's AI stack at once
HUMAIN, the AI company owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, came out of LEAP 2026 holding agreements with every major supplier in its industry. Over four days at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham, the company announced arrangements covering AMD processors, NVIDIA systems, Amazon's own in-house chips, Qualcomm mobile processors and Cisco networking equipment, and put its Arabic language model into the sales catalogues of both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Securing that many suppliers at once, in a year when the companies making the chips can choose their customers, is rare for any buyer at any scale.
Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, described the effort in a statement issued on the opening day as a national one rather than a corporate one. "No company delivers something at this scale on its own," he said. "What you are seeing is a country rallied around a mission, with partners across the Kingdom building alongside us. The leadership understood early that AI is a foundational technology rather than an additive one, and everything we are building serves that vision."
Held under the theme "Into New Worlds," the event ran from Monday to Thursday across 16 stages with more than 1,000 speakers, 1,800 technology brands and 600 startups, and organisers confirmed 1,289 investors from 1,016 firms attending, managing a combined $14.5 Trillion. Saudi officials counted more than $15 billion in launches, investments and partnerships from the opening day alone, against a cumulative $44.2 billion recorded by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology across the event's first four editions.
Every major supplier said yes in the same week
Most countries building national computing capacity settle on one principal supplier, because a single relationship is simpler to negotiate and easier to run. The advantage of the alternative shows up in pricing, in delivery schedules and in the freedom to move work between systems as newer equipment becomes available.
Riyadh assembled the alternative in public. AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN confirmed on Monday that the first AMD Instinct MI355X systems in Saudi Arabia had gone into service and were already running customer jobs, an arrangement that lets HUMAIN rent computing time by the hour to companies wanting to build their own software without buying machines of their own.
Amazon Web Services confirmed that its first Saudi data centre region opens in December, representing more than $5.3 billion in planned spending and taking the company to 40 such regions worldwide. Its expanded agreement with HUMAIN covers a $5 billion joint investment and makes up to 50 megawatts of capacity available by 2028, roughly the electricity draw of a small town, using a mixture of Amazon's own Trainium chips and NVIDIA systems. Two competing chip designs, inside one building.
Microsoft moved on a shorter timetable, opening its Saudi Arabia East region across three Eastern Province locations in November. Qualcomm supplied the fourth strand, launching an office and home computer called Horizon Ultra with HUMAIN, built on the Snapdragon X2 Elite processor and designed so that some work happens on the machine itself and some is sent to a data centre, with the first version available to business customers on 20 September. stc group, through its subsidiary center3, is building capacity starting at 250 megawatts while extending undersea, overland and satellite links between Saudi facilities and markets abroad. Olayan Alwetaid, CEO of stc Group, described the country as undergoing "a rapid transformation in the field of AI."
ALLAM went into two catalogues that compete with each other
Hardware is the easier half of the achievement. A country that builds its own language model and then sells it through a single company's catalogue has gained less than the model deserves.
HUMAIN placed ALLAM, its Arabic language model, in Amazon's Bedrock catalogue and in Microsoft Foundry, competing products from competing companies, while the HUMAIN Fabric data platform goes into the Amazon marketplace. A separate Microsoft agreement combines HUMAIN's business software with Microsoft 365 and Copilot, aimed at one million users across the Middle East and Africa.
The company also released HUMAIN M3, an Arabic model trained on more than one trillion units of text and published openly, meaning any developer can download and adapt it rather than renting access. Alongside it came HUMAIN Voice, which holds spoken conversations in Saudi, Maghrebi, Egyptian and Levantine Arabic, dialects different enough that systems trained on formal written Arabic tend to struggle with all four. A collaboration with the American laboratory Reflection AI will put that company's first publicly available model on machines inside Saudi Arabia, with both sides examining whether Reflection might rent Saudi computing capacity for its own work.
"Open models are becoming an increasingly important part of how the public and private sectors build and control their AI capabilities," Amin said in the joint announcement.
The longest-range piece sits closer to the machine. HUMAIN intends to release its own operating system for the Horizon Ultra in 2027, replacing Windows on a second generation of the device, with a target of one million machines sold across the Middle East and Africa by 2030.
MI355X is carrying customer work today, MI400 is a 2027 commitment
Announcement totals conceal a distinction that matters more than the money, which is the difference between machines carrying customer work now and machines described in a timetable.
The AMD cluster that went live on Monday uses the MI355X processor, while the next phase, up to 250 megawatts beginning in 2027, is specified on AMD's Instinct MI400 series, a product the company has yet to release. The one gigawatt target for 2030 runs on hardware nobody has seen.
Amin addressed the distinction himself. "Putting this infrastructure into production demonstrates HUMAIN's ability to build, operate and deliver advanced AI infrastructure at scale," he said in the announcement issued with AMD and Cisco, adding of a separate project that "AI ambition only matters when you can turn it into infrastructure, compute and capacity that customers can use."
That second remark accompanied confirmation from HUMAIN and DataVolt that construction has begun on a 100-megawatt section of a 360-megawatt site at Oxagon, the industrial city NEOM is developing on the Red Sea, with the wider campus planned to reach 1.5 gigawatts. DataVolt and NEOM signed a $5 billion agreement covering the same location at LEAP 2025, so the change this year is that ground has been broken. Elsewhere, xAI disclosed a Saudi data centre starting at 50 megawatts and growing towards 500 megawatts.
Austria came to Riyadh with GovGPT and the same questions
Reading any of this as a Gulf story misses what the exhibition halls were actually full of. Austria sent its national research institution, its infrastructure and telecommunications regulators and companies working in cloud services, engineering and transport, in a delegation led by Alexander Pröll, State Secretary at the Federal Chancellery for Digital Affairs, Constitution and Public Service.
"Both our countries are pursuing ambitious, government-led digital transformation agendas, Vision 2030 on the Saudi side, and on ours a clear push toward digital sovereignty, from our Public AI Initiative and our Chatbot 'ida' for the federal administration, GovGPT, to our digital identity system, ID Austria," Pröll told Asharq Al-Awsat in Riyadh, in one of the few interviews at the event conducted outside a press office.
Pröll has argued at the United Nations Global Dialogue on AI Governance for binding international rules, and he set out why he considers that compatible with speed. "I don't see that as a brake on innovation. I see trust as a precondition for AI to be adopted at scale, by citizens and by businesses," he said, naming quantum computing and quantum communications as fields where cooperation now could determine competitiveness for a decade. Rules appeared on the exhibition floor as well, where AMD, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Digital Cooperation Organization launched a programme combining AMD's developer training with instruction on ethics and governance.
Tawakkalna now carries 1,700 services for 36 million users
Tuesday belonged to hardware people could walk up to. Across LEAP and DeepFest, the AI event running alongside it, visitors saw humanoid robots from AGIBOT and Unitree, a system from COGNIXION that lets people operate devices using brain signals, and computer systems from Supermicro.
PSYONIC demonstrated an artificial hand that adjusts to the person wearing it. "We want the prosthetic hand to feel less like a tool and more like an extension of the user's body," said Dr Aadel Akhtar, CEO of PSYONIC, in comments distributed by organisers. "By collecting movement and sensor data from human users, we can teach robots to perform the same tasks."
Zhang Min, vice president at Unitree, said in the same set of statements that the company's priority is "making advanced robotics more accessible, practical and scalable, helping industries explore new ways to improve productivity, safety and efficiency." HUMAIN and Applied Intuition announced a plan to put self-driving lorries on Saudi freight routes, with thousands of vehicles intended by 2030.
Alongside the show floor, one of the week's largest numbers came from government services. During the event, 62 government bodies were recognised for completing their connection to Tawakkalna, the national services app run by the Saudi Data and AI Authority, adding 926 services to a platform the authority says now carries more than 1,700 services, serves over 36 million users and handles more than 85 million transactions a day.
Riyadh backed the companies that will use the capacity
Wednesday turned towards the companies expected to fill all this capacity. NHC Innovation announced a SAR 3.3 billion investment, roughly $880 million, in Khuzam Digital Valley, a data centre development to be built in phases with NAVER Innovation and BytePlus as its first customers. "LEAP brings together the global technology ecosystem at a time when Saudi Arabia is accelerating its ambitions across AI, cloud and digital infrastructure," said Eng. Rayan Alaql, CEO of NHC Innovation.
Foras AI announced a $20 million programme to back and buy regional companies, and the Digital Government Authority agreed a partnership with the investment firm STV, which will identify startups through its technology fund while the authority supplies government projects, a testing environment and routes to public contracts. estaie, a Dubai hospitality company that uses software to set hotel prices and manage bookings, raised $5.2 million to expand into Saudi Arabia, and the Rocket Fuel competition put 100 finalists, drawn from more than 3,000 applications, in front of investors for $1 million in prizes carrying no equity.
Building the workforce ran alongside building the capacity all week. Opening the event, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha said the Saudi digital economy had grown 69% since LEAP began, from $118 billion to $199 billion, with women now making up 36% of the technology workforce. Dr Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, put the matter without ornament from the Main Stage. "The real power of AI will come from what people build with it," she said.
Her point recurred across the programme. HP announced a startup incubator named after the Palo Alto garage where the company began, alongside updates from its research centre in Dhahran, which HP says is building software that handles Arabic-language technical support requests on its own, reads documents to check them for errors, and predicts which students are at risk of dropping out. At a session on building a games industry from nothing, Yannick Theler, CEO of Steer Studios, argued that developing local talent matters as much as capital, and that lessons from abroad need adapting to the Saudi market.
November, December, 2027, 2028
The figures above come from the companies and ministries making the announcements, as they do at every technology event of this size, which is why the delivery calendar carries the real weight. Microsoft's Eastern Province facility is due in November. The Amazon region is due in December. The second AMD phase begins in 2027 on a processor not yet on sale. Oxagon delivers its first 100 megawatts in 2028.
The value of what HUMAIN assembled will show up in none of those dates directly. It will show up in the terms Saudi companies are offered for computing time in three years, at a moment when buyers elsewhere are discovering how much a single supplier relationship costs them.
Pröll offered the standard that applies to every delegation that passed through Malham this week, his own included. "What matters most to me is that the relationships built this week don't stay at the level of good intentions, but turn into real projects, in research, in infrastructure, in AI governance, over the coming months," he said.
