Magna AI signs six partnerships at LEAP 2026 sovereign AI showcase
Magna AI, the AI transformation company established through a partnership between Trend Micro and Wistron Digital Technology Holding Company and powered by NVIDIA, concluded four days at LEAP 2026's DeepFest Hall in Riyadh with six signed partnership frameworks and a full showcase of its sovereign AI stack. The company says the agreements are intended to move AI adoption in Saudi Arabia from pilot-stage experimentation to production-scale, governed deployment.
The booth at DeepFest featured eight live demonstration pods spanning AI infrastructure, a sovereign AI operating system, industry-specific applications and enterprise cybersecurity. Partner organisations VicOne, TrendLife and EEC also featured across the pods.
The six collaborations
Four of the newly formalised agreements are with Saudi-based companies. The framework with Boud, an AI and digital transformation firm, covers enterprise AI platforms, infrastructure and governance, with Boud handling solution integration and client delivery. The agreement also identifies AI academies and certification programmes as joint development targets, in line with the Kingdom's Saudization objectives for national capability building.
The deal with Foresighted focuses on sovereign AI infrastructure and governed AI transformation, combining Magna AI's secure platform capabilities with Foresighted's expertise in integrating AI into existing organisational systems from the outset. The scope includes transformation design, semantic data foundations, AI governance, pre-release validation and accountable operations.
A separate framework with Intella, an Arabic-first company specialising in dialectal voice and conversational AI, pairs Arabic-language models with Magna AI's sovereign infrastructure. The companies intend to advance AI data centres and what they describe as "sovereign AI factories" for both government-led and enterprise use cases. The collaboration with MBUZZ, a Saudi-headquartered ICT infrastructure and integration company, is framed as a regional play, extending across the broader MEA market and combining Magna AI's transformation services with MBUZZ's compute, storage, networking and high-performance computing integration capabilities.
On the technology side, the partnership with VAST Data integrates Magna AI's value-chain model with the VAST AI Operating System, which unifies storage, database and distributed compute on the company's Disaggregated and Shared-Everything architecture to support large-scale training, inference and agentic workloads.
"Together with our ecosystem, we aim to help organisations move from experimentation to production while maintaining control over their data, models and operations, aligned with Saudi Arabia's AI ambitions and Vision 2030," said Dr Moataz BinAli, chief executive of Magna AI.
Market context
Saudi Arabia's push for sovereign AI capability is one of the more substantial government-led AI programmes outside the United States and China, underpinned by Vision 2030 and a series of large state-directed infrastructure investments. The Kingdom has made clear its intention to build domestically controlled AI infrastructure rather than depend entirely on hyperscaler cloud services, creating an addressable market for vertically integrated vendors such as Magna AI.
The sovereign AI category is attracting growing competition. Hyperscalers including AWS, Microsoft and Google have all announced or expanded in-country cloud zones across the Gulf to meet data-residency demands, while regional systems integrators and global AI infrastructure vendors are similarly pursuing partnership-led routes to market. Magna AI's differentiated positioning centres on a security-first architecture inherited from parent company Trend Micro's cybersecurity heritage, which may prove a meaningful advantage as governments tighten requirements around AI governance and supply-chain assurance.
The EU AI Act and emerging national AI regulations in the Gulf are both pushing enterprise and government buyers towards documented governance frameworks and auditability, trends that structurally favour vendors able to demonstrate end-to-end controlled deployment rather than generic cloud-hosted services. Magna AI has not disclosed revenue figures, customer contract values or the financial terms of any of the six agreements signed at LEAP.