Huawei Cloud fuels Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions at LEAP 2025

At LEAP 2025, Huawei Cloud demonstrated its commitment to Saudi Arabia’s AI leadership, showcasing its Riyadh Region as a pivotal hub for AI development in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. The company highlighted how its sophisticated infrastructure and AI capabilities are empowering the Kingdom to build locally relevant AI solutions while maintaining data sovereignty.

Launched in September 2023, the Huawei Cloud Riyadh Region serves over 1,000 customers and 300 partners across government, finance, media, and e-commerce sectors. Its 3AZ architecture delivers low latency rates, boasting 25ms within Saudi Arabia and 100ms across the region. Huawei Cloud has solidified its position by obtaining a Class C license from Saudi Arabia’s Communications, Space, and Technology Commission (CST) and entering the National Framework Agreement (NFA V2.0), enabling direct cloud service procurement by government entities.

Alan Qi, President of Huawei Cloud Middle East and Central Asia, stated that Huawei Cloud is transforming how enterprises harness AI. He emphasized that the Riyadh Region provides the foundation for Saudi Arabia to develop AI solutions aligned with its unique needs and values. Huawei Cloud showcased its “AI for industries” approach, highlighting its Pangu model series and DataArts platform at LEAP. The company emphasizes its focus on Arabic language models and localized AI solutions to ensure the technology is accessible and relevant to the Saudi market.

Lawrence Liu, CEO of Huawei Cloud Saudi Arabia, underscored Huawei’s dedication to fostering a robust digital ecosystem by developing 200,000 developers, building solutions with 1,000 local partners, and supporting 2,000 startups in Saudi Arabia. Huawei Cloud combines “Cloud for AI” and “AI for Cloud,” leveraging cloud infrastructure to build AI model capabilities and utilizing AI to enhance cloud development processes.

Huawei Cloud aims to focus on Saudi Arabia while serving the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa, providing innovative, reliable, secure, and sustainable cloud services. Huawei has committed to investing 400 million USD in the Saudi Arabia cloud region over the next five years. To connect Chinese and Saudi enterprises internationally, Huawei released the ‘Saudi Arabia Go Cloud Go Global’ plan, which will foster growth and innovation. Huawei plans to train 500,000 developers in Saudi Arabia over the next five years, build joint solutions with 1,000 local partners, and launch the Huawei Cloud Entrepreneurship Program to help 2,000 startups grow. Huawei Cloud is also assisting the Saudi government in delivering more efficient digital services across departments using AI.