Saudi Arabia starts work on huge government data centre

• Construction begins in Riyadh
• Plans for growth in government data
• Scope for private companies to use

Saudi Arabia’s plans to build what is set to become the world’s largest government data centre underline the scale of its ambition to digitise public sector data and services, experts have told AGBI, as the state prepares for a sharp rise in computing demand across government.

The vast capacity of the Hexagon data centre, construction of which began this month in Riyadh, will give Saudi Arabia unprecedented in-house computing power. 

However specialists say it could also, over time, be opened in a controlled way to parts of the private sector, allowing national champions or strategic programmes to tap into surplus capacity once the sovereign core is established.

At 480 megawatts, the Hexagon data centre will boast more processing power than many privately run AI data centres, according to the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA).

A data centre’s compute potential reflects the maximum amount of energy it draws when operating at max capacity.

SDAIA has integrated data from nearly 200 government entities into the “Deem” cloud project since 2018 which provides an integrated cloud computing platform where more than 250 data centres’ data can be stored and retrieved.

Projects like the Deem cloud, which is centralising much of the Saudi government’s data in one place, mean Saudi Arabia already needs significant data storage and processing power.

The 30 million square foot Hexagon data centre will allow all government and citizen data to be processed within national borders, Mohammed Qahtani, CEO of Saudi Arabia Holding Company, wrote on LinkedIn.

Carrington Malin, a Dubai-based entrepreneur and writer of the Middle East AI News newsletter, said that increasing use of the internet of things (IoT) – devices and sensors, including cameras, connected to the internet that collect and relay data – in Saudi Arabia is likely to require the ability to process large volumes of data and might explain the scale of the Hexagon data centre.

Reuters /Fahad Shadeed

SDAIA says that Deem Cloud “leverages the IoT and AI to transform physical spaces into intelligent environments” – an activity likely to produce huge quantities of data that needs processing, including from cameras across the Saudi transport system.

For example, the Saher system monitors and regulates traffic in eight major cities across Saudi Arabia, using cameras to track traffic, register violations and follow vehicles, among other uses.

Riyadh’s public transit system has around 14,000 cameras, according to data shared with AGBI from technology comparison website Comparitech.

“These cameras alone could easily produce petabytes of data per month and this includes video feeds that are processed in real time, which requires a lot of processing power,” Malin said. 

Mohammed Soliman, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of West Asia, said that the scale of the project is about planning for ever larger Saudi Arabia-based government data capacity.

“Four hundred and eighty megawatts tells you this isn’t about cleaning up legacy government IT,” Soliman said.

“The Saudi state is planning for a world where compute demand inside government explodes: Agentic systems, integrated national databases, and workloads that simply can’t sit on rented foreign cloud infrastructure.”\

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The scale of the project means there’s also scope – though this hasn’t been announced by officials – for some of the Hexagon data centre’s capacity to be used by the private sector in the future, Soliman said.

“I wouldn’t read Hexagon as a commercial play, but I also wouldn’t assume it stays sealed forever,” he said.

“Once the sovereign core is in place, controlled access for national champions or strategic programmes makes sense. Scale creates surplus, and surplus is what lets governments experiment without giving up control.”

Saudi construction company Albawani has been appointed as the contractor to build the Hexagon data centre. No time frame has been given for the project’s delivery.

SDAIA could not be reached for comment.