Key Takeaways
- HUMAIN and DataVolt have broken ground on a 100MW first phase of a 360MW AI data center at Oxagon, NEOM.
- The 100MW phase is expected to be operational in 2028, forming part of DataVolt’s wider planned 1.5GW Oxagon campus.
- Oxagon offers pre-zoned industrial land, large-scale energy resources, and subsea cable connectivity to Europe and Africa.
- The project reflects a shift from AI ambition to AI execution, with construction now actively underway.
- It builds on a broader national push positioning Saudi Arabia as a growing hub for AI infrastructure and governance.
Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions just moved from blueprint to construction site. At LEAP 2026, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced that groundbreaking is officially underway on a major new AI data center at Oxagon, NEOM’s industrial city on the Red Sea coast — a clear signal that the Kingdom’s push into large-scale AI infrastructure is now firmly in delivery mode.
Breaking Ground on a Landmark AI Infrastructure Project
HUMAIN, the PIF-backed company delivering full-stack AI capabilities, has expanded its partnership with DataVolt, a Saudi developer and operator of sustainable digital infrastructure, to jointly build 100MW of a planned 360MW AI-ready data center. This 100MW is the first slice of DataVolt’s much larger 1.5GW campus vision for Oxagon, with the initial capacity expected to come online in 2028.
The facility is being designed to integrate renewable energy sources, advanced cooling technology, and high-performance computing clusters — infrastructure purpose-built for the intensity of modern AI and cloud workloads rather than retrofitted from older data center models.
Why Oxagon Was Built for This
Location matters enormously for AI infrastructure, and Oxagon brings some genuine structural advantages to the table: pre-zoned industrial land ready for development, large-scale energy resources, and low-latency connectivity to Europe and Africa through subsea cables. In an industry where power access, build speed, and connectivity increasingly determine the economics of compute, these aren’t small details — they’re the difference between a project that stays on paper and one that gets built on schedule.
A Partnership Built to Deliver, Not Just Announce
What stands out about this announcement is the emphasis on execution over ambition. HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin framed it plainly: AI ambition only becomes meaningful once it’s turned into usable infrastructure and compute capacity. DataVolt CEO Rajit Nanda echoed that sentiment, describing the milestone as proof of disciplined delivery — power, engineering, construction, and operations all moving in step.
NEOM’s own leadership pointed to the deal as evidence that Oxagon’s industrial ecosystem is now taking tangible shape, with the ability to secure power, land, and connectivity becoming one of the defining competitive advantages in the global AI infrastructure race.
Part of a Bigger National AI Push
This project doesn’t exist in isolation. It lands alongside a broader wave of Saudi AI momentum — from national AI governance initiatives to the Kingdom’s rise in global AI growth rankings — reinforcing that Oxagon’s data center build-out is one piece of a much larger, coordinated national strategy rather than a standalone project.
For investors and technology partners watching the region, the message is straightforward: the capital, the land, the power, and now the construction crews are all lining up in the same direction.
