In Saudi Arabia, Groq is collaborating with Aramco Digital to build what it calls the ‘world’s largest inferencing data center’
In sum – what to know:
AI data center investment – Groq sees the Kingdom’s surplus energy and land as ideal for large-scale AI infrastructure.
Expanded collaboration – Groq and Aramco Digital plan to build the world’s largest AI inferencing data center with $1.5 billion in Saudi funding.
AI strategy gains traction – A localized LLM and Vision 2030 initiatives could make Saudi Arabia a leading AI and data export hub.
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 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 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.
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy aims to diversify its economy and make AI a key driver of growth. PwC estimates that AI could contribute $135 billion — or 12.4% of GDP — to the Saudi economy by 2030, according to the CNBC.
Groq is collaborating with Aramco Digital to build what it calls the “world’s largest inferencing data center.” The U.S. firm has also received $1.5 billion in Saudi investment to expand its regional presence and support the Saudi Data and AI Authority’s large language model (LLM), tuned specifically for local applications and datasets, the report added.
Ross said the model is optimized to understand queries about the Kingdom and its industries, unlike global LLMs that rely heavily on English-language data.
In August, Saudi AI venture Humain, backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Groq announced the deployment of OpenAI’s new open-source models – gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B – in Humain’s sovereign data centers in Saudi Arabia.
Humain noted that the models run on Groq’s high-speed inference platform and are fully hosted within the country.