Humane leads $15 billion of computing investments in LEAP with giant data centres partnered with Together AI and XAI

The technical LEAP conference kicked off with the announcement of a $15 billion package of investments and strategic commitments dedicated to technology and artificial intelligence, to make up for the four-month postponement imposed by the regional conflict, and to cement Saudi Arabia’s position at the heart of the heated regional race as the leading computing and AI hub in the Gulf.

Humane, the investment and operating arm tasked with delivering the kingdom’s AI ambitions, led the scene with several high-performance computing infrastructure deals. The company signed an agreement with the U.S. cloud-computing platform Together AI to build an advanced data centre with a computing capacity of up to 250 megawatts, a project that is expected to generate total annual revenues exceeding $5 billion in its first year of operation.

These computing alliances place power-generation capacity and hyperscale data centres at the centre of the economic equation, and free the models from sole reliance on external clouds.In parallel, Amazon Web Services (AWS) expanded its partnership with Humane to supply the kingdom’s first AI-dedicated computing region with capacity of up to 50 megawatts by 2028. xAI, the company of billionaire Elon Musk, also unveiled a plan to build its first data centre outside the United States, targeting an initial capacity of 50 megawatts before gradually scaling to 500 megawatts.

This investment momentum attracted participation from leaders of major global tech firms such as Nvidia, Google, Meta, Lenovo, Nokia, Uber, Roblox and Luma AI, with a total of 1,800 tech brands showcasing cloud-computing, cybersecurity, fintech, smart-city and robotics applications. The developments follow a 69 percent growth in Saudi Arabia’s digital economy since the launch of LEAP in 2022, lifting its size from $118 billion to $199 billion according to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

What changes in practice for system developers and tech leaders in the Gulf and sister Arab countries is directly linked to computing physics and data-localisation rules.Operating data centres with a combined capacity of several hundred megawatts on regional land means a sharp reduction in inference response time and provides internal processing options that resolve the regulatory-compliance challenge for sensitive sectors such as banks and health-service providers, instead of sending sensitive data streams to servers in North America or Europe.

Making specialised platforms for model training and inference such as Together AI and Amazon’s cloud available locally gives engineering teams and startups in Riyadh, Cairo and Muscat the ability to reserve high-performance compute capacity at lower entry cost and with flexibility to scale complex computational architectures, shifting competition from merely consuming ready-made APIs to building and developing sovereign AI models that run on stable, geographically proximate infrastructure.