LEAP 2026 opens with Amazon and Nvidia projects trailed for day one
LEAP's fifth edition opened this morning at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham, and for anyone tracking AI infrastructure the show has become the single most concentrated week in the Gulf calendar. It runs until 3 September, with the co-located DeepFest programme powered by SDAIA running alongside it.
The most consequential line so far came before the doors opened. Speaking at a Ministry of Media press conference, communications and information technology minister Abdullah Al-Swaha said Saudi Arabia has exported more than 3,000 locally manufactured servers to neighbouring countries. Three thousand units is not a volume that troubles anyone's supply chain. The point is the direction. A country that has spent four years buying compute is now claiming, modestly, to sell it, and that is a different position in the value chain to the one the Kingdom occupied at LEAP 2022.
Al-Swaha also said the telecoms access gap has fallen from 50 per cent to 1 per cent, and the service quality gap from 15 per cent to 5 per cent, with the Crown Prince following periodic reports on service levels, complaints and remedial measures.
What is trailed for today
The ministry indicated that large projects involving Amazon and Nvidia are due to be announced today, without disclosing values or structures. It also said Microsoft would officially launch its Azure cloud service as part of the event.
That last item needs care. Microsoft's own newsroom said in February that the Saudi Arabia East region becomes available for customers to run cloud workloads from the fourth quarter of 2026, with three availability zones in the Eastern Province, and construction of the three data centres has been completed. Whatever is announced here is therefore a launch event or a general availability date, not the moment workloads start running. The relationship has form: Microsoft announced its intent to build the region at LEAP in February 2023, so the show is where the milestones get marked rather than where they get delivered.
Snowflake said in a pre-show release that it will announce a strategic initiative with the communications ministry, described as long-term support for the Kingdom's digital transformation and AI ambitions. No value was disclosed.
None of these is confirmed. At the time of writing, no opening-day investment total had been published for 2026. The widely quoted $14.9bn opening-day figure belongs to LEAP 2025, when the largest named deals were Groq and Aramco Digital at $1.5bn for AI cloud expansion, and Alat and Lenovo at $2bn for an AI and robotics manufacturing hub.
HUMAIN is the reason the vendors came
The gravitational centre of the Saudi compute story is HUMAIN, the state-owned AI company launched in May 2025 and led by Tareq Amin, who speaks on the main stage this week alongside AMD chair and chief executive Lisa Su and Cisco chair and chief executive Chuck Robbins.
The figures behind HUMAIN are all pre-existing, none was announced here, and they are worth restating because they set the scale everything else is measured against. Reported technology agreements of around $23bn with Nvidia, AMD, AWS, Cisco and Qualcomm. A $3bn commitment to xAI's Series E. A $10bn venture fund for AI startups. Twin 100 MW campuses under construction in Riyadh and Dammam. Nvidia supplying chips for a 500 MW build-out with a first tranche of 18,000 Blackwell parts, and a $10bn collaboration with AMD. Amin has said the company will reach 1.9 gigawatts of capacity by 2030, against a land bank of 211 plots with access to 14 gigawatts of power.
That last pairing is the one to watch. Power availability, not capital and not silicon, is the constraint that has throttled AI data centre delivery in every established market. Every gigawatt of announced capacity has to be matched by a gigawatt somebody can actually deliver, on a grid, on a schedule. Saudi Arabia's pitch is that it can do both, and the credibility of the 2030 numbers rests on interconnection and generation rather than on chip allocations.
On the floor
Exhibitors include Google Cloud, Microsoft, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Qualcomm, IBM and Adobe, alongside Saudi participants. stc Group is showing secure infrastructure and high-performance networks. Elm is presenting AI-powered digital government work that it says reaches more than 30 million users across 16 sectors and processes more than three billion digital transactions a year through over 350 e-services. Red Sea Global is demonstrating its Nucleus intelligent operations centre.
Organisers say the event carries more than 1,800 technology companies and, per a release issued today, 1,289 investors from 1,016 firms representing $14.5tn in assets under management. Those are organiser figures and no independent verification exists. Treat the attendance projections, which have appeared as both 200,000 and 250,000, the same way.