AWS announced at LEAP in Riyadh that its first cloud infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia remains on track to launch in December 2026, backed by more than $5.3 billion in planned infrastructure investment. Alongside that launch date sits another number worth noting: 100,000, the number of Saudi citizens AWS wants to train for digital careers before the region even reaches full operation.
The region itself, first announced back in March 2024, will bring AWS’s global infrastructure count to 40 worldwide. Alongside it, AWS and HUMAIN, a company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, plan to make up to 50 megawatts of capacity available in the Kingdom’s first AI Zone by 2028. That capacity will run on AWS’s own Trainium chips alongside Nvidia’s latest AI hardware, giving customers infrastructure built specifically for AI training and inference workloads.
The partnership goes beyond raw compute. HUMAIN’s ALLAM Arabic large language model will soon become available through Amazon Bedrock, giving customers managed access to Arabic-language AI capabilities. HUMAIN Fabric, the company’s AI-native data infrastructure platform, will also become available through AWS Marketplace as part of the expanded collaboration.
Several Saudi organizations, including Abdul Latif Jameel, Almosafer, and stc Group, have already committed to running AI workloads on AWS once the region opens. stc Group separately announced a broader collaboration with AWS to accelerate cloud and AI adoption across Saudi Arabia, while regional integrated solutions provider ZainTECH signed a multiyear agreement focused on helping organizations adopt AWS tools while strengthening security and compliance.
The workforce piece runs in parallel with all of this. Amazon Academy, developed with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, offers free training in cloud computing, AI, logistics, and retail, with a goal of reaching more than 100,000 Saudi citizens.
AWS has also partnered with 11 higher education institutions in the country and is training up to 10,000 women at no cost through its Saudi Arabia Women’s Skills Initiative. Across the wider Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey region, AWS says it has already reached more than 680,000 people through similar programs, working toward a target of 2 million by 2030.
An IDC report commissioned by AWS estimates AI could add $130 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by 2030. The new region gives that estimate an actual timeline to test itself against.
