Underlining Saudi Arabia’s reputation as the fastest-growing data centre market in the Middle East are no fewer than three data centre-related announcements this week.
The first is from data centre infrastructure provider Pure Data Centres, and digital infrastructure platform Dune Vaults. These two companies have announced a joint venture to develop hyperscale data centres in Saudi Arabia.
The partners says they plan to develop multiple 100+ MW-capacity campuses of best-in-class facilities, making their venture one of the largest data centre providers in the region, poised to meet growing local and international customer demand.
Meanwhile, data centre and digital infrastructure services company Ezditek says it has broken ground on its flagship data centre facility in the capital, Riyadh.
The RUH01, as it will be known, is to be located on a more than 35,000 square metre plot in the Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University (PNU). It is mainly aimed at providing a sustainable and scalable foundation for local digital transformation.
Its strategic location, says Ezditek, provides an ideal entry point for hyperscalers, cloud providers and enterprises looking to establish a presence in the country with direct access to major carriers.
Ezditek adds that the RUH01 will reach 100% of public and enterprise customers in the Saudi central region and deliver a maximum capacity of 24 MW. The facility is expected to go live by Q1 2026.
The third announcement involves Saudi ICT infrastructure company Tawal and 5SKYE, a provider of edge AI infrastructure solutions, which have signed a partnership through which they will jointly deploy 5SKYE’s next-generation 5G AI micro edge data centres, providing what is described as scalable, real-time data processing.
By combining Tawal’s telecommunications expertise with 5SKYE’s “innovative and aesthetically pleasing” edge AI use case infrastructure, the partnership says it will enable industries across the kingdom to adopt intelligent applications that enhance efficiency, reduce costs and drive growth.
The infrastructure, say the partners, will support transformative use cases such as IoT-driven CCTV, AI analytics, digital advertising and edge compute/MEC, further empowering sectors like public safety, logistics, retail and industrial automation, as well as smart city initiatives.
As a number of news outlets note, these and many other such initiatives are driven by government digitalisation efforts, a ‘cloud first’ policy and a favourable regulatory environment, so we can, presumably, expect even more such announcements in the coming weeks and months.
