LEAP 2026: The Billions in Tech Commitments, and What Has Actually Been Built
LEAP 2026 closed with nearly $15bn in announced investments and agreements. We separate new money from restated figures, valued-at numbers from capital, and plans from services you can use today — with a five-question guide to reading any LEAP headline.
LEAP, the technology conference the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology runs in Riyadh each year, closed its fifth edition on 3 September 2026 with a familiar kind of headline: nearly $15 billion in investments, agreements and announcements over four days. AI infrastructure, data centres, cloud regions, device manufacturing and venture capital all contributed.
That number is real, in the sense that the organisers published it. It is also a sum of very different things: money being spent on buildings now, money promised for the late 2020s, the stated value of free software licences, and figures that were first announced at earlier editions. This article sets out what LEAP 2026 actually announced, how its headline total compares with earlier years, and how to tell which announcements have become something you can buy or use.
LEAP 2026 in brief: dates, organisers and a delayed start
The fifth edition was originally planned for April. In March 2026 the organisers moved it to 31 August – 3 September 2026, citing the regional conflict that had disrupted travel and large events across the Middle East. It was held at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center in Malham, under the theme “Into New Worlds”, and organised by MCIT with the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones, Tahaluf and the Events Investment Fund.
Reported scale was similar to recent editions: more than 1,500 exhibitors from 72 countries and over 1,300 speakers, with the organisers stating that close to 1,400 investors attended. The sixth edition has already been dated for 12–15 April 2027, which puts LEAP back on its usual spring slot only seven months after this one ended.
The delay matters for anyone reading the numbers. Several of the projects announced on stage in September had already been announced, or had their timelines set, earlier in the year. A September conference was always going to collect updates as well as launches.
The headline number, and how it compares
The figure circulating as “$15 billion” is two slightly different numbers. On the opening day, 31 August, reports of the minister’s keynote described launches, investments and partnerships worth more than $15 billion. The official closing summary published by MCIT after the event said nearly $15 billion. MCIT also published day-by-day figures: more than $2.5 billion on day two and $857 million on day three. Those daily figures do not add up neatly to either headline, which tells you the total is a curated tally rather than a ledger anyone outside can audit.
The fair way to compare editions is to use the organisers’ own series, with the same caveats applied to every year.
Figures are MCIT’s reported “launches and investments” per edition, on one common scale. They are announcement totals, not money spent, and they may include amounts announced before the event.
Read plainly, the series shows rapid growth from 2022 to 2024 and then a plateau: 2026 is roughly level with 2025. MCIT put the first four editions at more than $44.2 billion combined; adding 2026 takes the organisers’ cumulative figure to just under $60 billion. That is our arithmetic on their numbers, not a figure MCIT has published.
What was announced, by category
Grouped by type, the announcements we could verify from company or official sources fall into five buckets. Only items with a primary or reputable source are named here.
AI compute. HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund’s AI company, anchored most of the capacity news. AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN said AMD Instinct MI355X infrastructure is now live in the Kingdom and serving HUMAIN customers, with a next phase of up to 250 megawatts beginning in 2027 and a stated path to 1 gigawatt by 2030. HUMAIN and DataVolt said they had broken ground on 100 megawatts within a 360-megawatt first phase at Oxagon in NEOM, with the first capacity expected in 2028. HUMAIN and Together AI announced a partnership that includes a new 250-megawatt data centre, with no site or schedule disclosed.
Data centres. Al Moammar Information Systems announced $1.2 billion to expand its data centres to 192 megawatts of total capacity. NHC Innovation announced data centres at Khuzam Digital Valley expandable to 65 megawatts by 2033; MCIT’s own releases give the amount as $880 million on day two and $800 million in the closing summary.
Cloud. Microsoft said its Saudi Arabia East region will be available to customers in November 2026. AWS said its first Saudi region is on track for December 2026, as part of a planned investment of more than $5.3 billion, and that it will make up to 50 megawatts available with HUMAIN in the Kingdom’s first AI Zone by 2028. Mobily and BytePlus announced more than $150 million to bring BytePlus cloud services to the Kingdom.
Manufacturing. Lenovo unveiled its first laptop made in Saudi Arabia, from its Riyadh plant built with PIF-owned Alat, with large-scale production expected from late 2026. Alfanar announced $150 million to manufacture data-centre components locally.
Venture capital and software. Day three included about $293 million in venture activity across 11 deals, among them a $100 million fund from Ula Capital with South Korea’s FuturePlay. Adobe announced a commitment it values at more than $4 billion, built around free access to its creative tools for over 27 million eligible residents.
Four stages, and why they get blurred
Every item above sits somewhere on a ladder with four rungs, and the conference format puts them all on the same stage with the same applause.
Announced means a company has said it intends to do something. Signed means there is an agreement between named parties — though a memorandum of understanding and a binding contract are very different documents. Under construction means ground has been broken or hardware is being installed. Operating means a customer can use it today.
| Announced before LEAP 2026 | Building stated as underway | Serving customers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AMD–Cisco–HUMAIN MI355X cluster | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| AMD–Cisco–HUMAIN next 250 MW phase | Yes | No | No |
| HUMAIN–DataVolt, Oxagon 100 MW | Yes | Yes | No |
| Microsoft Saudi Arabia East region | Yes | Yes | From November |
| AWS Saudi region (over $5.3 bn) | Yes | Not detailed | From December |
| AWS–HUMAIN AI Zone, up to 50 MW | Yes | Not detailed | By 2028 |
| Lenovo–Alat Riyadh factory | Yes | Yes | Late 2026 |
| Together AI–HUMAIN 250 MW | No | No | No |
| Adobe free-access programme | Builds on 2025 deal | Not applicable | By end of 2026 |
Based on the companies’ own statements as of the article date. “Announced before” means the project, venture or headline amount had been made public at an earlier event or release, not that nothing new was added in September.
Two things stand out. Only one of the nine is fully serving customers today. And at least seven of the nine were, in one form or another, already public before the conference opened. That is not a criticism. Infrastructure takes years, and an annual conference is a natural place to report progress. It is simply a different thing from new money.
Old numbers in new headlines
The clearest example is AWS. The “more than $5.3 billion” attached to its Saudi region in September 2026 coverage is the same figure AWS announced at LEAP 2024, in March of that year, when it said the region would open in 2026. It was the largest single item in LEAP 2024’s $13.4 billion. The 2026 news was the launch month, December, and an expanded AI Zone commitment with HUMAIN.
That AI Zone itself was first announced in May 2025, when AWS and HUMAIN said they planned to invest more than $5 billion. What was new at LEAP 2026 was a capacity figure and a date: up to 50 megawatts by 2028. MCIT’s closing summary lists the AWS figure among the event’s announcements but does not say whether, or how much of, it was counted again in the total.
Microsoft follows the same arc over a longer span. A $2.1 billion hyperscale cloud commitment was one of the headline items at LEAP 2023. Microsoft reported progress on the Saudi region in December 2024, confirmed in February 2026 that customers could run workloads from the fourth quarter, and used the LEAP 2026 stage to name November.
- Feb 2023Microsoft cloud commitment at LEAP 2023$2.1 billion for hyperscale cloud infrastructure, announced alongside an Oracle cloud region.
- Mar 2024AWS region announced at LEAP 2024More than $5.3 billion, with the region planned to open in 2026.
- Dec 2024Microsoft reports region progressSaudi Arabia East, in the Eastern Province, with three availability zones.
- May 2025AWS–HUMAIN AI Zone announcedA planned investment of more than $5 billion, with no capacity date at the time.
- Aug–Sep 2026Dates named at LEAP 2026Microsoft: November 2026. AWS region: December 2026. AI Zone: up to 50 MW by 2028.
Measured from first announcement to stated availability, both hyperscale regions took roughly three years. That is a reasonable benchmark to hold any new LEAP data-centre headline against.
“Valued at” is not “invested in”
The second distortion is in what a dollar figure measures. Three examples from this edition show the range.
Adobe’s commitment is “valued at over $4 billion”. Its release does not say how that value was calculated, and the substance is twelve months of free access to Firefly Standard and Adobe Express Premium features for more than 27 million eligible people aged 13 and over, plus an Arabic image model being built with HUMAIN and Arabic right-to-left support in Adobe Express. That is a meaningful programme. It is not $4 billion of capital arriving in the Kingdom, and nobody should read it as such.
The Together AI partnership was reported with a figure of more than $5 billion — but as a target for annualised revenue, not as an investment. And day two’s total included a $300 million investment led by Vision Invest and the Africa Finance Corporation in WIOCC, to expand digital infrastructure in Africa: Saudi capital at a Saudi event, deployed elsewhere.
Megawatts need the same care. At least four LEAP 2026 frameworks involve a 250-megawatt figure, and the published material does not establish whether they are separate sites. Adding them up would almost certainly overstate what is being built.
How to read a LEAP headline
None of this requires cynicism. It requires the same five questions every time a large number appears on a conference stage, in Riyadh or anywhere else.
- 1What kind of number is it?Capital expenditure, a fund size, a revenue target, the retail value of free licences, or a capacity ceiling. Each means something different.
- 2Is it new?Search the company name with the previous LEAP year. Many headlines are progress updates on earlier commitments, which is useful news but not additional money.
- 3What document sits behind it?A company press release, a stock-exchange disclosure on Tadawul, or a memorandum of understanding. Listed companies are required to disclose material developments; an MoU often carries no obligation.
- 4Is there a site, a phase and a date?Groundbreaking, a named location and a first-capacity year move an announcement from intention towards construction.
- 5Can a customer use it yet?A cloud region appears in the provider’s console; a GPU service has a price list; a factory ships a product. That is the only stage that changes your options today.
To track what happens next, the most reliable trail is the company’s own channel rather than the conference recap: the cloud provider’s region list, the listed company’s Tadawul filings, the project’s next press release. Put a reminder in your calendar for the stated date, and look again at LEAP 2027 in April. An honest conference edition should report progress on the previous one’s promises, and this one partly did.
What it means for Saudi startups
For founders, the most directly useful announcements were not the largest. Day three’s venture tally — around $293 million across 11 deals, including nine funding rounds for Saudi and regional companies in AI, fintech, travel, HR and gaming — is money that has, in most cases, already been raised. Impact46 and HALA also enlarged their SME financing vehicle from $26.7 million to $66.7 million.
The compute announcements matter more slowly. GPU capacity that is live and sold as a service in the Kingdom lowers one barrier for startups training or serving their own models, and the capacity planned for 2027–2028 suggests that barrier will keep falling. Adobe’s programme also includes a year of free tools and training for startups in MCIT’s entrepreneurship programmes from early 2027.
The honest caution is that big infrastructure announcements do not, by themselves, create customers. The startups that benefit are the ones solving a specific problem for a buyer with a budget. If you are working out where your own product sits in that picture, our piece on compute strategy in the Kingdom covers when national capacity is the answer and when it is not.
What it means for enterprise buyers
For organisations buying AI, the practical news from LEAP 2026 is narrower than the headline and more useful. Two more hyperscale cloud regions are due to open inside the Kingdom before the end of 2026, if the stated dates hold. That widens the set of in-country hosting options, which matters for data residency under the Personal Data Protection Law. This is not legal advice; whether a given deployment complies depends on its specifics, and your counsel should confirm.
What a new region does not decide is whether your assistant sends prompts to a model hosted somewhere else. Hosting location and the answering path are separate architectural choices, and the second is the one regulators and auditors increasingly ask about. We have written about that distinction in sovereign AI versus cloud AI and in our guide to PDPL and data residency.
Most enterprise assistants do not need national-scale compute. A retrieval assistant answering from an organisation’s own documents is a small, narrow workload. Elbi, which we build, is designed for that case: it answers from your approved material on hardware you control inside the Kingdom, with no external model call in the path. The national build-out is good news for ambitious AI projects. It is not a reason to move your most sensitive conversations onto someone else’s cluster.
When a vendor cites a LEAP announcement in a sales conversation, apply the same five questions. “Partnered with HUMAIN at LEAP” or “hosted on the new region” should come with a document, a stage and a date — and an answer to where your data goes when a question is asked.
The honest limits of this article
Every total in this article is a figure reported by MCIT, the Saudi Press Agency or the companies themselves. We have not audited any of them, and the organisers do not publish the line items behind the headline total, so we cannot say exactly how much of the nearly $15 billion was new, how much was a restatement, or how much was counted at stated value rather than capital spent. Where official releases disagree with each other — NHC Innovation’s amount, the opening-day versus closing total — we have reported both.
The stages in our table reflect what companies had said publicly by mid-September 2026. Some projects may be further along than their press releases show; others may slip. We have named only announcements we could trace to a primary or reputable source, which means some genuine LEAP 2026 deals are missing here simply because we could not verify them.
Sources
- LEAP 2026 Concludes with Nearly $15 Billion in Investments, Agreements; 2027 Edition Set for April — Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Sep 5, 2026
- LEAP 2026 Concludes with Nearly $15 Billion in Investments, Agreements; 2027 Edition Set for April — Asharq Al-Awsat (via SPA), Sep 4, 2026
- LEAP 2026 Day Two: Over $2.5 Billion in Investments to Expand Saudi Data Center and Advanced Technology Capabilities — MCIT, Sep 1, 2026
- From Riyadh to the World: LEAP Evolves into a Global Tech Movement as It Prepares for Its Fifth Edition — MCIT, Aug 29, 2026
- Third day of LEAP 2026 brings $857m in technology investments — Madhyamam (citing SPA), Sep 3, 2026
- Saudi tech event LEAP rescheduled for late August amid Iran war — Arab News, Mar 19, 2026
- LEAP 2026: Saudi Arabia Leads AI Era with Over $15 Bn in Technology Launches, Investments — Asharq Al-Awsat, Aug 31, 2026
- LEAP 2026: Riyadh’s tech show closes with $15 billion and a bigger stage — Salaam Gateway, Sep 6, 2026
- Day one of LEAP: HUMAIN wires Saudi into the full AI stack — Enterprise AM, Sep 1, 2026
- AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN Expand Saudi Arabia’s AI Infrastructure as AMD Instinct Systems Go Live — AMD, Aug 31, 2026
- HUMAIN partners with DataVolt to jointly develop 100MW of a 360MW AI data center project in NEOM — NEOM, Aug 31, 2026
- HUMAIN, Together AI to build new 250 MW data center in Kingdom — Mubasher, Aug 31, 2026
- AWS cloud region in Saudi Arabia on track to launch by December 2026 — Amazon, Aug 31, 2026
- AWS and HUMAIN Announce Groundbreaking AI Zone to Accelerate AI Adoption in Saudi Arabia and Globally — Amazon, May 13, 2025
- AWS to launch new Region in Saudi Arabia — W.Media, Mar 4, 2024
- Microsoft Confirms Saudi Arabia Datacenter Region Available for Customers to Run Cloud Workloads from Q4 2026 — Microsoft, Feb 11, 2026
- Microsoft to Make Its Saudi Arabia Datacenter Region Available in November — Asharq Al-Awsat, Sep 1, 2026
- Adobe, MCIT and HUMAIN expand partnership, providing over $4bn in free access to AI-powered creative tools — Adobe, Aug 31, 2026
- Lenovo Set to Begin Saudi Production in Late 2026 — Asharq Al-Awsat, Sep 1, 2026
- U.S. Companies Launch New Investments at LEAP 2023 — U.S.-Saudi Business Council, Mar 3, 2023
- Saudi Arabia Solidifies Its Position as a Regional and Global Hub for AI with $14.9B in Investments at LEAP25 — Argaam, Feb 9, 2025
Common questions
MCIT’s closing summary put LEAP 2026 at nearly $15 billion in announcements, investments and agreements over four days, 31 August to 3 September 2026. Opening-day reports had said more than $15 billion. Both are announcement totals published by the organisers, not audited spending.
At the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center in Malham, from 31 August to 3 September 2026. It was originally planned for April but was rescheduled in March 2026 because of the regional conflict. The next edition is set for 12–15 April 2027.
On the organisers’ own figures, LEAP 2024 reported $13.4 billion and LEAP 2025 reported $14.9 billion, so 2026 was roughly level with 2025. The first four editions together exceeded $44.2 billion, according to MCIT.
No. AWS first announced the more-than-$5.3 billion Saudi region at LEAP 2024, in March of that year. What was new in 2026 was the December 2026 launch month and a commitment with HUMAIN to make up to 50 megawatts available in an AI Zone by 2028.
Ask what kind of number it is, whether it was announced before, what document sits behind it, and whether it has a site, phase and date. Then follow the company’s own channel rather than the conference recap: a cloud region list, a Tadawul disclosure, or the project’s next press release.
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