For years, everyone talked about “Vision 2030” through the lens of architectural spectacle. NEOM’s The Line dominated headlines. Glass towers pierced the sky in renderings. Giga-projects promised to reshape the desert. But as we step into 2026, something fascinating has happened. The conversation has shifted. We’re no longer in the era of blueprints and concept art. We’ve entered what insiders are calling the “Execution Era.”
And here’s the twist, the real backbone of this transformation is not found in those glittering skyscrapers at all. It’s buried in silicon chips and subsea cables. It’s humming in server farms. It’s flowing through the “center3” project. Saudi Arabia is orchestrating an aggressive play to become the “MENA Data Epicentre,” the primary digital hub linking Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The 1.3GW Ambition
Let’s talk numbers, because the scale here is genuinely staggering. The Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) has thrown down an ambitious gauntlet: attract USD 18 billion in investment to reach hyperscale data centre capacity of 1.3GW by 2030. And this isn’t vapourware.
As of early 2026, the momentum is already visible. Major players like DataVolt have committed to massive installations, including a 1.5-gigawatt AI-ready data centre in NEOM that leverages sustainable cooling technologies.
But here’s what makes this strategy brilliant. This isn’t merely about local storage capacity. Saudi Arabia is playing a much bigger game. It’s about becoming a global transit hub. The Kingdom currently hosts a significant concentration of the region’s subsea cable landings. By exploiting its unique geography (perched at the literal crossroads of three continents), Saudi Arabia is constructing what analysts are calling the “Digital Silk Road.”
This network systematically bypasses traditional bottlenecks in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. How? By creating terrestrial data corridors that guarantee lower latency and higher redundancy for global tech giants. When your data travels from Mumbai to Frankfurt, it might soon route through Riyadh instead of traditional pathways. That’s power.
Center3 As A Strategic Nexus
At the operational heart of this strategy sits center3, a subsidiary of stc Group. Throughout 2025 and into 2026, center3 has rapidly expanded its footprint, ascending into the “Leaders Category” of IDC MarketScape for colocation services. What makes center3 strategically invaluable? It’s integrating subsea cable landing stations directly with carrier-neutral data centres. This creates the “hard infrastructure” that the digital economy desperately needs.
The business case practically writes itself. Consider the market trajectory. The Saudi data centre services market stood at approximately USD 2.1 billion in 2024.
Projections show it surging to USD 7.7 billion by 2033. That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 15%. What’s fuelling this explosive growth? The arrival of “hyperscalers” like Google, AWS, and Oracle. All three have established cloud regions within the Kingdom to comply with increasingly strict data residency laws and to serve the exploding regional demand for AI processing capabilities.
AI-Ready Infrastructure And Tech Real Estate
The defining shift in 2026? The race toward AI-readiness. Standard data centres are rapidly becoming obsolete, outpaced by the power-dense requirements of Generative AI. Saudi Arabia recognised this early.
The Kingdom is building its infrastructure from the ground up to support high-density racks and advanced liquid cooling systems. With a projected 29% CAGR in IT power load through 2030, Saudi Arabia is effectively manufacturing the most valuable “tech real estate” on the planet.
By treating data as the new oil (yes, they’re aware of the irony), Saudi Arabia is diversifying its economy through physical infrastructure that will prove essential for the next decade of global connectivity.
Sure, the headlines still gravitate toward NEOM’s architectural ambitions. But pay attention to what’s actually happening. The future of the Middle East’s economy is being written right now in the server rooms of Riyadh and Jeddah. And unlike oil, this resource doesn’t deplete. It multiplies.