AWS plans to launch Saudi Arabia region in 2026 with over $5.3B investment

Amazon Web Services is planting a flag in the Saudi Arabian desert, announcing plans to launch a dedicated infrastructure region in the Kingdom by December 2026. The project carries a price tag exceeding $5.3 billion, roughly SAR 19.88 billion, making it one of the largest cloud infrastructure commitments in the Middle East to date. The new region will launch with three Availability Zones, the standard AWS architecture that distributes workloads across physically separate data centers within the same geographic area. For enterprises operating in the Kingdom, this means data can stay within Saudi borders rather than bouncing to existing AWS regions in Bahrain or the UAE. What the investment actually buys AWS has also partnered with HUMAIN, an entity backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, to create a dedicated “AI Zone” in the Kingdom. That partnership comes with an additional investment of more than $5 billion directed specifically at AI infrastructure and talent development. The AI Zone with HUMAIN is designed to do more than just host GPU clusters. AWS has committed to training 100,000 Saudi citizens in cloud computing and generative AI skills through innovation centers ...