Construction begins in Riyadh Plans to increase government data Scope of access for private companies
Saudi Arabia’s construction plans for what will be the world’s largest government data center highlight the scale of the kingdom’s ambitions to digitize public sector data and services, experts told AGBI as the country prepares for a surge in computing demand across the government.
The massive capacity of the Hexagon data center, which began construction this month in Riyadh, will give Saudi Arabia unprecedented in-house computing power.
But over time, experts say, it could also be opened up to parts of the private sector in a controlled way, allowing national champions and strategic programs to tap into surplus capacity once a sovereign core is established.
At 480 megawatts, the Hexagon data center has more processing power than many privately run AI data centers, according to the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA).
A data center’s computing power reflects the maximum amount of energy it consumes when operating at maximum capacity.
Since 2018, SDAIA has integrated data from approximately 200 government agencies into its “Deem” cloud project, providing a unified cloud computing platform that can store and retrieve data from more than 250 data centers.
Saudi Arabia already has significant data storage and processing power needs, with projects like the Deem cloud centralizing much of the Saudi government’s data in one place.
Saudi Holding Company CEO Mohamed Qatani wrote on LinkedIn that the 30 million square foot Hexagon data center will allow all government and citizen data to be processed within the country’s borders.
Carrington Marin, a Dubai-based entrepreneur and author of the Middle East AI News newsletter, said Saudi Arabia’s increasing use of the Internet of Things (IoT) – devices and sensors such as cameras that connect to the internet and collect and relay data – will likely require the ability to process large amounts of data, which could explain the size of Hexagon’s data center.
SDAIA said Deem Cloud will “leverage IoT and AI to transform physical spaces into intelligent environments,” and that this activity will likely generate large amounts of data that will need to be processed, including from cameras across Saudi Arabia’s transportation system.
For example, the Saher system monitors and regulates traffic in eight major cities across Saudi Arabia, using cameras to track traffic, register violations, track vehicles, and more.
Riyadh’s public transport system has around 14,000 cameras installed, according to data shared with AGBI by technology comparison website Comparitech.
“These cameras alone can easily generate petabytes of data per month, including video feeds processed in real time, which requires a lot of processing power,” Marin said.
Mohamed Soliman, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of West Asia, said the scale of the project is about the Saudi-based government’s ever-larger plans for data capacity.
“When you look at the 480 megawatts number, you know this is not about wiping out legacy government IT,” Soliman said.
“The Saudi state is planning a world where computing demands within government will explode: agent systems, integrated national databases, and workloads that cannot simply be placed on rented foreign cloud infrastructure.”\
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The size of the project has not been announced by authorities, but it means there is room for some of the Hexagon data center’s capacity to be used by the private sector in the future, Soliman said.
“I don’t read ‘Hexagon’ as a commercial play, but I also don’t think it will remain sealed forever,” he said.
“Once the core of sovereignty is in place, it makes sense to control access to national champions and strategic programs. Scale creates surplus, and surplus allows governments to experiment without relinquishing control.”
Saudi construction company Al Albani has been appointed as the contractor for the construction of the Hexagon data center. There is no set deadline for the project’s realization.
SDAIA could not be reached for comment.
