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Once completed, the data center will cover around 2.78 million square meters on a site in Riyadh
In sum – what to know:
Government facility – SDAIA’s Hexagon project will span 2.78 million square meters in Riyadh and operate at Tier IV reliability.
Sovereign AI – The site will host over 290 government systems, supporting national data, AI, and digital services.
Wider buildout – The project adds to a growing pipeline of multi-hundred-megawatt and gigawatt-scale data centers in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) held a ceremony to mark the laying of the foundation stone for its Hexagon data center project. According to recent posts shared by SDAIA on LinkedIn, construction has now begun on the facility. Once completed, the data center will cover around 2.78 million square meters on a site in Riyadh.
It is designed for a total power capacity of 480MW and will be built to Tier IV standards, certified by the Uptime Institute. Images shared by SDAIA show a distinctive design made up of two concentric hexagons surrounding a central courtyard, which gives the project its name.
The Hexagon data center will host more than 290 government systems and has been designed to meet green building requirements. SDAIA described the project as the largest government data center in the world. The project aligns with Saudi Vision 2030, the national strategy launched in 2016 by the Saudi authorities to reduce reliance on oil revenues and expand investment in digital infrastructure and technology.
Speaking at the ceremony, SDAIA president Abdullah bin Sharaf Al-Ghamdi said: “The Hexagon data center will be followed by the establishment of other centers. This center is a qualitative strategic boost toward making the Kingdom a global center for data, ensuring data sovereignty and security, and enabling innovation and a digital economy.”
SDAIA was established in 2019 and launched with the slogan “data is the oil of the 21st century.”
Saudi Arabia continues to attract large-scale data center investment. In 2025, companies including xAI and Humain announced plans for a 500MW facility in the country, STC outlined 1GW of capacity in partnership with Humain, and Khazna disclosed a 1GW data center development pipeline.
Saudi Arabia is positioned to become a global hub for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, supported by its abundant energy resources and growing number of large-scale data center projects, according to AI start-up Groq CEO Jonathan Ross.
Speaking with CNBC during the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in October 2025, Ross described the Middle East — and particularly Saudi Arabia — as “the ideal place” for AI data center construction, citing the region’s energy surplus and available land.
“One of the things that’s hard to export is energy,” Ross said. “It’s physical and expensive to transport. Data, by contrast, is cheap to move. So since there’s plenty of excess energy in the Kingdom, the idea is move the data here, put the compute here, do the computation for AI here, and send the results.”
Ross noted that data centers are better located in regions where land and energy are underutilized — conditions that make Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East appealing for AI infrastructure.
