Overview
- Amazon Web Services announced on Monday, August 31, 2026 that it will launch a Saudi Arabia cloud region by December 2026 with an investment exceeding $5.3 billion and three Availability Zones.
- AWS said the Saudi region will let organizations keep data inside the Kingdom rather than routing to Bahrain or the UAE, meeting local rules from financial and cybersecurity authorities that drive demand for onshore hosting.
- The company also disclosed a partnership with HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund-backed firm, to build an AI Zone with more than $5 billion in investment and up to 50 megawatts of AI capacity by 2028.
- As part of the HUMAIN deal AWS pledged to train 100,000 Saudi citizens in cloud and generative AI skills through innovation centers and research grants, targeting local workforce growth for projects like NEOM.
- The Saudi launch follows AWS’s Jan 2025 Jeddah edge deployment and fits into a wider AWS expansion that adds 18 Availability Zones and six regions, while Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud already operate onshore in the Kingdom.