Amazon Web Services (AWS) is significantly accelerating its presence in the Gulf by rolling out AWS AI Factories, a dedicated infrastructure offering designed to meet the rigorous data sovereignty and high-performance computing needs of the region’s largest enterprises and governments.

The launch is strategically underpinned by a major partnership in Saudi Arabia, where AWS is collaborating with HUMAIN, a global AI company backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The collaboration with HUMAIN is set to establish a first-of-its-kind “AI Zone” in Riyadh, representing one of the Middle East’s most ambitious technology infrastructure projects.

AWS will deploy and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators, including the latest NVIDIA GB200/GB300 GPUs and AWS’s custom Trainium AI chips, within a purpose-built HUMAIN data centre.

This AI Zone is designed to serve both Saudi Arabia’s national AI requirements and the growing global demand for compute, positioning the kingdom as a future hub for AI innovation and service export.

Customers will gain immediate access to core generative AI services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, allowing rapid development and deployment of AI applications without the complexity of managing the underlying hardware.

“The AI factory AWS is building in our new AI Zone represents the beginning of a multi-gigawatt journey for HUMAIN and AWS. From inception, this infrastructure has been engineered to serve both the accelerating local and global demand for AI compute,” says Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “What truly sets this partnership apart is the scale of our ambition and the innovation in how we work together. We chose AWS because of their experience building infrastructure at scale, enterprise grade reliability, breadth of AI capabilities, and depth of commitment to the region. Through a shared commitment to global market expansion, we are creating an ecosystem that will shape the future of how AI ideas can be built, deployed, and scaled for the whole world.”

Dedicated AWS AI infrastructure will be deployed in customers’ own data centres.

ADDRESSING GULF SOVEREIGNTY AND SCALE

The new AWS AI Factories model directly tackles the critical challenge faced by Gulf entities in regulated sectors (such as energy, finance, and government): the need for massive-scale AI capability while maintaining strict control over data residency.

Organisations in regulated industries and the public sector face a critical AI infrastructure challenge in getting their large-scale AI projects deployed. Building their own AI capabilities requires massive capital investments in GPUs, data centres, and power, plus navigating complex procurement cycles, selecting the right AI model for their use case, and licensing models from different AI providers. This creates multi-year timelines and operational complexity that diverts focus from their core business goals.

 AWS AI Factories address this challenge by deploying dedicated AWS AI infrastructure in customers’ own data centres, operated exclusively for them.

AWS AI Factories transform a customer’s existing data centre space, network connectivity, and power into a fully integrated, private AI environment.

The factories deliver a secure, low-latency deployment that operates like a private AWS Region, combining the latest NVIDIA accelerated computing platform with AWS high-speed networking and managed services.

By housing the dedicated AWS infrastructure within the customer’s facility, organisations can leverage their established resources while AWS handles the deployment and management complexity, ensuring compliance with data sovereignty and regulatory mandates.

The enduring partnership between AWS and NVIDIA ensures customers can run large language models (LLMs) faster and more securely using technologies like the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures, tightly integrated with the AWS Nitro System.

“Large-scale AI requires a full-stack approach – from advanced GPUs and networking to software and services that optimise every layer of the data centre. Together with AWS, we’re delivering all of this directly into customers’ environments,” says Ian Buck, Vice-President and General Manager of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA. “By combining NVIDIA’s latest Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures with AWS’s secure, high-performance infrastructure and AI software stack, AWS AI Factories allow organisations to stand up powerful AI capabilities in a fraction of the time and focus entirely on innovation instead of integration.”

AWS AI Factories are built to meet AWS’s rigorous security standards of providing governments with the confidence to run their most sensitive workloads across all classification levels: Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret. AWS AI Factories will also provide governments around the world with the availability, reliability, security, and control they need to help their own economies advance and take advantage of the benefits of AI technologies.

AWS AI Factories enable customers to rapidly accelerate AI adoption by using services like Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker in their data centres, with the flexibility to use their GPUs and network connectivity in a secure, tailored environment.

The initiative aligns with regional visions, such as Saudi Vision 2030, which projects AI to contribute a significant portion of the country’s GDP by the end of the decade.