Saudi Arabia has spent 2026 turning a political slogan into physical infrastructure. Declared the Kingdom's "Year of Artificial Intelligence" under the patronage of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the initiative has already translated into the Hexagon Data Center in Riyadh, a 480-megawatt facility its operators describe as the largest government-run computing site in the world.
The buildout sits on top of a policy structure designed around sovereignty rather than convenience. The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, chaired by the Crown Prince, has folded more than 430 government systems into a National Data Lake built to keep citizen and state data processed domestically rather than routed through foreign cloud providers. Nine cloud regions are now under development across the Kingdom, with four being built out by international hyperscalers, including a Microsoft Azure region due in the Eastern Province by the fourth quarter of the year.
Money has followed the policy. Saudi officials say the AI sector attracted $9.1 billion across 70 investment deals in 2025 alone, with 664 companies now active in data and AI fields nationally. A separate $5 billion agreement with DataVolt will convert part of the NEOM development at Oxagon into a data centre hub expected to be operational by 2028.
The cybersecurity and workforce pieces are being built in parallel. The Kingdom's SAMAI programme says it has trained more than a million Saudi citizens in AI skills in a single year, roughly 2.8% of the population, with more than 11,000 specialists receiving advanced training through domestic and international partners. Officials frame the combination of sovereign data infrastructure, hyperscale capacity and a rapidly trained workforce as the foundation the Kingdom needs before it can credibly compete for a larger share of global AI investment.
