Amazon investing $5.3B in Saudi Arabia cloud, AI infrastructure
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making a major expansion in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the end of the year.
The hosted cloud services division of Amazon intends to launch an AWS cloud infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia in December 2026. AWS initially announced this initiative in early 2024.
[READ MORE: Amazon Web Services to expand in two new geographic areas]
The new AWS region will consist of three availability zones at launch and represents more than $5.3 billion in planned cloud infrastructure investment. AWS regions contain availability zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations. Each availability zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
AWS customers can design their applications to run in multiple availability zones to achieve greater fault tolerance. The company says that availability ones are located far enough from each other to support customers’ business continuity, but near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple availability zones.
This launch will expand the AWS global infrastructure to 40 regions worldwide. AWS is also partnering with Humain, an artificial intelligence company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, to make 50 megawatts of capacity available in Saudi Arabia’s first AI zone by 2028 as part of an expanded strategic collaboration.
This first-of-a-kind initiative will bring together multiple components, including dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers with semiconductors, AWS Trainium chips and the latest Nvidia AI infrastructure.
“Saudi Arabia is home to some of the most ambitious and inventive builders, from startups and enterprises reimagining industries to public sector organizations deploying AI at scale, and the new AWS Region in the country will help them to continue to innovate,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS., in a corporate blog post.
In addition, Humain’s ALLAM Arabic large language model will soon be available through the Amazon Bedrock managed generative AI platform.
The expanded collaboration also includes the availability of Humain Fabric, an AI-native data infrastructure and platform component of the HUMAIN ONE generative AI operating system, via AWS Marketplace.
Beyond infrastructure, the Amazon Academy, launched with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), provides free training in cloud computing, AI, logistics, and retail, aiming to train more than 100,000 Saudi citizens for digital careers.
AWS has partnered with 11 higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia and is training up to 10,000 women through the AWS Saudi Arabia Women's Skills Initiative at no charge help accelerate Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goal of empowering women to increase participation in the workforce. AWS will also establish two innovation centers in Saudi Arabia to provide technical mentorship and training to startups and entrepreneurs across the region.
“Saudi Arabia is building the computing power needed for the Intelligence Age and strengthening its position as a global computing partner,” said His Excellency Engineer Abdullah Alswaha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia minister of communications and IT. “The launch of AWS’s new region and its expanded partnership with Humain will help accelerate AI innovation, enable new industries, and advance the goals of Saudi Vision 2030.”
