Saudi Arabia is building out the infrastructure needed to turn its AI ambitions into a functioning industrial stack. A string of agreements announced around this week’s Leap conference spans capacity, connectivity, computing, and AI applications, as the Kingdom moves to build the physical backbone for an AI economy. The build starts with data center capacity: Humain and digital infrastructure firm DataVolt have started construction on 100 MW of an AI-ready data center at Oxagon, Neom’s industrial city on the Red Sea coast, according to a statement. The capacity forms part of DataVolt’s 360 MW first phase within a planned 1.5 GW AI data center campus, with the first 100 MW expected to come online in 2028. There’s more: Al Moammar Information Systems said it will spend USD 1.2 bn expanding its data centers to 192 MW of total capacity; NHC Innovation will invest USD 880 mn in data centers at Khuzam Digital Valley, targeting 65 MW by 2033; and Zain KSA signed a non-binding MoU with DataVolt to explore building data centers in the Kingdom, capacity it would share with government, enterprise, and cloud providers. The infrastructure to deliver it is coming next: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is targeting a December launch of its Saudi cloud region and has committed up to 50 MW to the Humain AI Zone by 2028, according to a statement. AWS announced back in 2024 that it woul launch a “hyper-scale” cloud region in Saudi Arabia by 2026 as part of a USD 5.3 bn investment ticket. Microsoft plans to open its own Saudi cloud region in November. And the AI is starting to leave the data center: Humain is partnering with US autonomous-vehicle software company Applied Intuition to deploy thousands of self-driving trucks across Saudi logistics corridors by 2030, Bloomberg reports. Autonomous trucks can