Saudi Arabia is reshaping its data center infrastructure as traditional facilities evolve into what NVIDIA describes as “AI factories,” designed to train, deploy and operate artificial intelligence systems at scale.
The shift comes as generative and agentic AI increase demand for computing power across businesses and government institutions. According to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, data center investments in Saudi Arabia have exceeded SAR16B since 2016.
Mark Domanic, NVIDIA’s vice president for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa and Southern Europe, said the transformation reflects one of the biggest infrastructure shifts since the rise of cloud computing. The company said AI factories combine accelerated computing, high-speed networking, high-performance storage and software to support large-scale training and inference.
The infrastructure is intended to help organisations move AI projects from experimentation into production, while developing applications tailored to their own data and operations. Potential use cases span healthcare, industrial automation, financial services, scientific research and robotics.
Energy efficiency is also becoming a key consideration as AI workloads expand. Domanic said infrastructure will increasingly be assessed not only by computing capacity, but by the amount of intelligence it can produce relative to the energy consumed.
The source said infrastructure alone will not be enough. Skills, research, software and collaboration between companies, cloud providers, researchers and entrepreneurs will also be needed to build Saudi Arabia’s AI economy.
Source: Jawlah
