ICS Arabia and XDS collaborate on immersion-cooled data centres

Details: Vaughan O'Grady; Category: Data Centres & Networks; 10 July 2025; 3393 views

Data centre company XDS Datacentres, which describes itself as a pioneer of liquid immersion digital infrastructure, has signed a major agreement with engineering and technology company ICS Arabia to deliver initial 10-megawatt immersion-cooled data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah.

The partners say that this strategic collaboration, developed within ICS Arabia’s Desert Dragon technology ecosystem, will bring advanced computing capacity, sustainability and scalability to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation.

Through its Desert Dragon initiative, ICS Arabia designs and operates Tier III and Tier IV data centres in collaboration with international and regional technology partners. This project will utilise Desert Dragon’s Tier III certified infrastructure and immersion-cooling technology to support high-density workloads such as AI, machine learning, blockchain, and other GPU-intensive applications.

Under the terms of the agreement, ICS Arabia will design, construct, and hand over the facility to XDS by June 2026.

Both Riyadh and Jeddah facilities will feature full immersion cooling with rack densities up to 368 kilowatts. This makes it ideal for services such as AI, GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), cloud-native compute, and hyperscale edge deployments. The design includes redundant N+N power and cooling systems; Tier III certification; and high-capacity network interconnectivity.

ICS say that clients of XDS in Saudi Arabia will enjoy a number of benefits, including 99.982% uptime guarantees; fully managed colocation services and smart hands; flexible power allocations; GPUaaS; private cloud; server conversion; customer rack migration and engineering support; infrastructure as a service (IaaS); and software as a service (SaaS).

The XDS data centre will support national cloud initiatives, artificial intelligence growth and enterprise workloads that require scalable, low-latency compute infrastructure.

This expansion into Saudi Arabia follows the successful announcement of XDS’s immersion-cooled facility in Dubai.

Ghufran Hamid, CEO of XDS, says: “We are pleased to partner with ICS Arabia on this landmark deployment. The kingdom represents a key growth market for XDS, and this initial 10MW facility will showcase the potential of immersion-cooled infrastructure to deliver both performance and sustainability.”