The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) has not said how many will be built or their total capacity
SDAIA’s President, Dr Abdullah Al-Ghamdi, launched several infrastructure expansion projects and new data centres in Riyadh which apparently “are the first of their kind” in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom also has a Cloud First strategy as part of its digitalisation programme, Saudi Vision 2030.
It has already attracted substantial investments by AWS, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Huawei and others. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to launch an AWS infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia in 2026. It has committed to invest more than $5.3 billion in the country.
The newly announced projects are intended to increase the capacity and operational efficiency of data centres. The programme is part of SDAIA’s strategy to develop sustainable data centres built to the best global practices and standards set by the UPTIME Institute, the global authority on data centre evaluation and classification.
They will have electrical capacity of up to 65 kilowatts per cabin but the exact number of new data centres and the total new capacity under development is unknown.
Mordor Intelligence estimated the country’s capacity was 345.31 MegaWatts (MW) in 2024, and is expected to reach 854.81MW by 2029, at a CAGR of 19.88% between those years.