Saudi Arabia is installing artificial intelligence (AI) compute clusters in datacentres across the country to compete for enterprise business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) as the main engine of a global AI platform being built by US chip pioneer Groq.
The Saudi Kingdom’s state oil firm, Aramco, is scoping multiple sites to house what may amount to 3.5 million AI inference processors – an astounding amount for the US firm that only last year, on securing a landmark $640m investment for a global expansion, declared its plans envisaging 100,000 more of them.
While European officials struggle to improve the continent’s AI competitiveness with proposals to fix its broken markets and lift its laggard computing sector, the US market leader is already building a compute cluster in Northern Europe as well, with Norwegian datacentre operator Waiys, to be powered by about 130,000 inference processors, it said last year.
That was before Aramco pledged to put $1.5bn into building a single Groq region – twice the amount Groq raised for its self-funded expansion over two sites in Europe and Asia, which, with its existing US cluster, will form a global cloud computing platform specialised to handle demand for high-volume AI workloads.
Even so, Aramco and Groq have quietly dropped a declared ambition for their Middle East venture to be the largest AI inference compute cluster in the world.
Competition mounting
Competition has meanwhile been mounting from EU and US firms that have been securing similarly immense investments themselves to build AI cloud computing firms running the most expensive and powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) chips by AI chip leader Nvidia. These not only handle the taxing, high-volume demand for large language models (LLMs) to infer answers for queries posted by users and business applications, but also can do the intensive computer processing required to create – or train – the brains in the first place.
Aramco’s Middle East cluster will nevertheless remain the single most important AI inference engine in Groq’s global system, and is already – and will continue – serving corporate customers across Europe, North Africa and West Asia as well, Groq chief revenue officer Ian Andrew told Computer Weekly.
Moreover, the oil firm’s $1.5bn was on top of money Groq had already spent constructing a Middle East cluster late in 2024, said Andrew. He would not reveal the total investment.
“It’s probably over 3.5 million LPUs [language processing units] over the course of 2025,” Andrew said of the Saudi compute facility, although adding that was a rough calculation.
“We have a datacentre in Dammam and plans to expand to other sites in Saudi over the year. It [will be] the single largest region in a global network,” he said. “Geographic proximity drives the likelihood of a request being served from that region. So, we see traffic predominantly from the Middle East, North Africa, West Asia and Europe.”
“We expect that to continue. Demand for AI continues to go up. We expect demand for infrastructure globally to be absolutely massive,” added Andrew.
The facility will help Saudi Arabia fulfil its Vision 2030 plan to transform its economy and polity by importing advanced technologies and pursuing the digital transformation of government and industry, said Tariq Amin, CEO of Aramco’s computing subsidiary, on announcing the Groq deal in September.
State officials hope it will attract AI startups to the region. The Gulf monarchy’s plan involves building tech industries to diversify its monolithic petro-state economy, accommodate a growing population, and prepare for a post-oil world.
Saudi government and industry were motivated to build the Groq cluster for the sake of data sovereignty, said Andrew. They could use AI to run their organisational processes without data leaving the country.
Investments pouring in
Meanwhile, investors have been pouring money into other AI cloud compute firms, many of them conventional cloud computing firms, only housing powerful Nvidia GPUs and offering customers the means to build, train and host their own AI models, as well as handle inference workloads demanded of them in operation.
Aramco and other state-owned Gulf corporations have been doing deals and making investments in Groq rivals as well. Aramco did a deal to use AI chips made by Groq’s closest rival, US-based Cerebras, last year, declaring it would use them to deliver local cloud services for not only inference processing, but also building and training AI models. Government-owned tech firm G42 in the neighbouring Gulf state of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) said last year it was building a 16-exaflop AI computer with Cerebras. That would put it among the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Alan Chabra, executive vice-president of worldwide partnerships at Cerebras, said the G42 deal was its largest with a public customer, but Aramco had plans to expand its deal as well. European firms were doing things on a smaller scale, he said.
Aramco venture arm Wa’ed also led a $176m investment in Ori Industries, a UK-based AI cloud services firm that uses Nvidia GPUs. It has operated with minimal funding since being founded in 2018.
UK-based Graphcore, another developer of AI inference processors, raised a similar amount of venture capital as Groq, on a similar valuation, before being acquired by Japanese investor Softbank last year. Other notable deals include France’s Scaleway pledging a €10bn AI datacentre in Paris, while US AI cloud firm CoreWeave has been investing heavily in Nvidia chips and European datacentres to house them after raising about $20bn.
Amrik Sangha, a partner at law firm Gately, who advises “big tech” firms building AI datacentres in the Gulf, said the region cannot spare resources to serve EMEA. It is trying to build capacity to satisfy growing local demand. The region’s datacentre capacity is so far behind the EU and US that the direction of travel of Gulf data commerce is usually the other way round, with countries running their services on datacentres in EMEA, he said.
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