Saudi AI start-up Think launches with patents pending and hardware-software infrastructure products set to debut at LEAP 2026

Riyadh-based Think, a start-up targeting GPU efficiency and AI infrastructure bottlenecks, has come out of stealth mode with patents pending on undisclosed products it plans to debut at LEAP in August.

The company was founded by Ahmed AlSharif, formerly Chief Technology Officer at Sandsoft and a veteran of PlayStation, EA, and Meta, alongside Ammar Enaya, a regional technology sales leader with more than 30 years of experience at companies including Cisco, HPE Aruba, and Vectra AI. Think is bootstrapped by its two founders and is currently exploring an initial funding round, having already signed several memoranda of understanding with prospective partners.

Think's focus is on a unified AI infrastructure that combines software and hardware to address what AlSharif described as systemic inefficiencies in how the industry currently procures and uses compute. The company is specifically targeting cooling, power efficiency, and GPU utilisation, constraints that have driven up costs as demand for AI hardware has outpaced supply.

AlSharif said his approach draws directly from the games industry engineering disciplines, which have been optimising GPU performance under hardware constraints for more than four decades. "I've spent close to two decades as a software engineer and engineering leader, and the games industry has been optimising GPUs and extracting maximum performance from constrained hardware for over forty years. So in reality, my core discipline was to solve computational problems," he said.

"The rush to build datacentres and roll out AI platforms has led to shortages and fast-rising costs for memory and GPUs, so I thought, why not apply the same engineering philosophy I've learned from games to the AI infrastructure problem? Where AI companies are seeing a hardware procurement challenge, we saw a GPU efficiency challenge, and that's what Think is focused on."

The company's co-founder brought a complementary commercial lens to the founding thesis. Enaya pointed to data sovereignty and cloud dependency as additional pain points driving early interest in Think's proposition. "With Think, we have a huge opportunity to work with companies that see the potential for AI, but are constrained by the rising cost of hardware, the dominance of a handful of cloud-based AI companies, and concerns around the security and sovereignty of their data and infrastructure," he said. "The number of positive conversations I've already had with companies in the region has shown us that the same infrastructure issues are affecting everyone, big or small."

Think's products are designed to enable what the company calls AI sovereignty, allowing organisations, enterprises, and governments to deploy AI without reliance on traditional data centres or cloud providers. The start-up plans to make a fuller product disclosure at LEAP, which takes place in Riyadh from 31 August to 3 September 2026.

The launch arrives at a moment of widening tension in the global AI infrastructure market. Hyperscaler dominance, concentrated among a small number of US cloud providers, has created structural dependencies that governments and enterprises in markets outside North America are increasingly reluctant to accept.

GPU supply constraints, which intensified sharply following the surge in large language model deployments from 2023 onwards, have made the cost of entry to AI at scale prohibitive for many organisations.

Think's positioning as a sovereign, hardware-efficient provider built for deployment outside the cloud reflects a broader market shift toward what analysts have begun calling the disaggregation of AI infrastructure: the gradual unbundling of compute, storage, and intelligence from the integrated stacks the major cloud vendors have built their AI businesses around.

In the Middle East, where governments are making AI a centrepiece of national economic diversification, a regionally focused infrastructure provider with a distinct technical approach fills a gap that procurement alone hasn't addressed.