- High demand driven by Vision 2030
- Current capacity 250MW
- Target is 1,000MW by 2030
Saudi Arabia plans to boost its data centre capacity four-fold to more than 1,000 megawatts over the next five years, according to one of the country’s leading data centre providers.
The current capacity in the kingdom is approximately 250-300MW.
Abdullah Al Ghamdi, CEO of Al Moammar Information Systems (MIS), revealed the target in an interview with the Saudi financial news platform Argaam.
Al Ghamdi said that his company expects to exceed its own planned initial capacity of 120MW quicker than expected.
MIS and Saudi Fransi Capital (SFC) created the Saudi Data Center Fund 1 in 2021 to build the initial 120MW of capacity.
The fund, valued at SAR1.5 billion ($399.6 million), has allocated nearly SAR1.3 billion to projects so far, and implemented 32MW of capacity, Al Ghamdi said.
In September, MIS and SFC signed a letter of intent to expand capacity to 96MW, requiring an estimated investment of SAR2 billion to 2.5 billion.
This week, MIS received new orders worth SAR83 million to boost the capacity of data centres being developed and designed with SFC, a statement to Tadawul said.
Al Ghamdi said the value of new contracts and deals at MIS had reached SAR2.1 billion, and he expected further growth “in the upcoming period”.
The company has recently signed a letter of intent and leasing contracts with the US tech giant Microsoft, Al Ghamdi said.
MIS is the largest player in Saudi Arabia’s carrier-neutral segment, meaning customers are not tied into a single provider. Al Ghamdi said he expected the company to receive 7 percent net returns from the signed contracts, as well as additional undisclosed profits resulting from implementation and development.
Leasing
A study on leasing high-performance computing infrastructure, utilising the latest graphics processing units, is expected to be completed within the next few weeks, with plans by MIS to launch the service by 2025, he said.
Data centres are crucial digital infrastructure used to host cloud computing services, including artificial intelligence, which has put pressure on data centres globally to expand capacity speedily.
A report by the property consultancy Knight Frank in 2023 found Saudi Arabia was the fastest-growing data centre market in the Middle East.
Al Ghamdi said his company was keeping pace with the rapid development in the field of technology and cloud computing, and adding capacity to support the high demand for data centre services in Saudi Arabia, driven by an influx of international cloud companies and the kingdom’s Vision 2030.