NTT DATA expands AI Factory to five locations, including Riyadh
NTT DATA announced the expansion of its global AI Factory footprint to five locations, adding sites in Paris, Munich and Singapore, joining the existing sites in Plano, Texas, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The five factories are designed to enable companies to trial their own workloads on real infrastructure before making large investment decisions, shortening the transition from pilot to production, which is a hurdle that often impedes AI projects in the region.
Munich site: specifications and partnerships
The newest location, the Munich factory, operates within the NTT Global Data Centers Munich 2 facility, which offers 6,300 square metres of data-center space across two buildings, with a critical IT load of 14 megawatts. The infrastructure is based on Cisco Secure AI Factory with the full-stack NVIDIA suite designed for sovereign cloud and the emerging neocloud. Kasi Roch, Cisco’s global vice-president for AI infrastructure and partnership sales, called the alliance a "strong foundation" for moving workloads from trial to production.
Regional angle: Riyadh as a launch point
Riyadh’s inclusion among the five sites is not accidental; it reflects the Kingdom’s digital-sovereignty trajectory, where computing capacity is built locally to serve national projects and regional companies without moving data beyond the borders. For a technology leader in Jeddah or Dhahran, this means the ability to test large language models or intensive inference workloads at a distance of kilometres rather than continents.
Developing signal: Osaka and Anthropic
Media reports (W.media, early October) indicated that NTT DATA is nearing an agreement with Anthropic to build a large-scale data centre in Osaka, Japan, at an estimated cost of $6.3 billion, which could become the company’s first dedicated centre in Japan, with a possible partial rollout in 2028. The two firms have not confirmed the deal, and negotiations may extend to March 2027.
What this means for the region
NTT DATA’s expansion puts sovereign AI infrastructure within reach of medium- and large-sized companies in the Gulf, not just tech giants. The ability to "try before you buy" on a full-stack NVIDIA platform inside a local data centre reduces deployment risk and speeds adoption of generative models in banks, telecoms, and government, sectors that still weigh computing costs against returns and fear data lock-in.