LEAP Day 1 – War? What War?

AI on track for reality.

• Resilience is the theme of LEAP 5, which kicked off today in Riyadh with a series of incremental announcements that bring AI in the Kingdom closer to reality in addition to greater commitment from foreign technology companies to the region.
• Despite the hostilities next door, the floor is as rammed as ever, which puts to bed the idea that no one was going to show up because of the war.
• A few foreign participants have sent fewer delegates this year, which is frankly a good thing as the halls are already busy enough, but I suspect that it will be back to full strength in 2027.
• The Minister of Communication and Information Technology opened proceedings with a lively session that highlighted 150,000 registrations, xAI upgrading to 500MW, AMD building its largest cluster outside of North America and appearances by Lisa Su (AMD) and Shantanu Narayen (Adobe).  
• He also made the point that Saudi Arabia would be ready to provide 12GW to power data centres by 2030, which is crucial as available power is one of the region’s greatest assets.
• At the moment, the Saudi Arabian roadmap is for 6GW by 2030 (or as fast as possible), meaning that there will be plenty of power for anyone who wants to come to the Kingdom and build a big data centre.
• However, they had better hurry up as Humain clearly has plans to take that power for further expansion as its build-out remains on track to hit 250MW by the end of this year and 1GW by the end of 2027.
• Sa’ad is the first campus under construction and will eventually be 24 square km in size and housing 6GW of capacity.
• The long-term ambitions are clearly much greater, as 6 more sites have been identified, including one at the NEOM site on the Red Sea Coast.
• This would make good use of the infrastructure that has already been put in place in anticipation of The LINE that was recently substantially scaled back.
• The good news for Humain is that everything that it has already built or is building is already sold out, which is giving it the confidence to push even further in rolling out AI services.
• Humain announced a deal with AWS going live in H1 2027 with its first 50MW going to 100MW, obviously with the scope for much more, which serves as a key anchor client for the business going forward.
• At a very simple level, the Middle Eastern proposition is that three commodities that the region has in abundance (land, energy and cash) are converted into tokens and exported at a very attractive price.
• This will help the region diversify away from petrochemicals, and as tokens are becoming a commodity, this is a business model the region is very familiar with.
• However, Humain wants to go further than this and once again highlighted its full AI stack going from AI infrastructure all the way to the ecosystem where AI services can be built.
• In my opinion, this is still quite early stage, but the emphasis is being placed on localisation, which in the Arabic language could deliver real differentiation.
• There is a vast amount of content that is available only in Arabic, which also has multiple dialects, accents and manners of speaking.
• Hence, an Arabic speaker based in the region will have a better experience with Allam than he or she will have with ChatGPT or Claude when asking about Arabic content in any Arabic dialect.
• This is where I think Humain’s stack can make a difference, and as there are 300m and rapidly rising native Arabic speakers, this is an opportunity worth addressing.
• The net result is that the Saudi Arabian ambition to become a centre for token generation as well as specialist AI services for the region remains intact and, most importantly, on track despite the events earlier this year.
• Last year was all about promises, but this year sees progress in line with those promises and more commitment to the region by the boilerplate technology companies that should give others the confidence to also build in the region.
• The Middle East has proved more resilient than many expected, and LEAP 5 is a sign that it is business as usual, and for as long as Europe continues to struggle, the Middle East will continue to reap the benefits.