Saudi fires up Gulf AI race with $15bn tech deals at LEAP

Saudi Arabia opened LEAP on Monday with $15 billion in planned technology investments and strategic commitments, a big display of speed after the conference was pushed back by four months because of the Iran war. The message was blunt: Riyadh wants the region’s AI crown, and it wants it now.

The headline deal came from Together AI, the San Francisco-based cloud platform, which signed with Saudi-backed HUMAIN to build a 250-megawatt AI data center in the kingdom. Together says that project should produce more than $5 billion in gross annualized revenue in its first year. AWS also widened its partnership with HUMAIN, which is the key vehicle for Saudi AI plans and is meant to deliver up to 50 MW of capacity in the kingdom’s first AI Zone by 2028.

Then there was xAI. Elon Musk’s company said it plans its first data center outside the U.S., starting at 50 MW and scaling to 500 MW. That’s not a small side project. It is a signal that the Gulf’s AI buildout is no longer just about hosting servers; it is about who gets to anchor the compute stack for the next wave of business.

Riyadh’s push is also a regional contest. The UAE is the obvious rival, and Saudi is clearly trying to outspend and outsignal it. LEAP 2026 drew senior leaders from NVIDIA, Google, Roblox, Uber, Meta, Lenovo, Nokia and Luma AI despite the geopolitical noise, which tells you the pitch is landing. Saudi’s communications ministry says the digital economy has grown 69% since LEAP launched in 2022, from $118 billion to $199 billion.

This year’s event has 1,800 global technology brands showing up around AI, cloud, cybersecurity, smart cities, fintech, healthcare, space, gaming and mobility. And yes, the robots are there too. At this point, if a tech conference in the Gulf doesn’t have robots on stage, did it even happen?