Launching its fifth edition, LEAP commenced with over $15 billion in tech investments and strategic pledges, solidifying the event's role as a global innovation platform and showcasing the swift expansion of Saudi Arabia's tech industry since its first edition in 2022.
During the opening of LEAP 5, Eng Abdullah Alswaha, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, underscored the swift growth of the technology sector in Saudi Arabia.
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Since the launch of LEAP, the Kingdom's digital economy has expanded by 69 percent, increasing from $118 billion to $199 billion, and women now make up 36 percent of the tech workforce.
The inaugural day included a range of significant announcements related to AI infrastructure, cloud computing, and autonomous technologies. In the major announcements, HUMAIN introduced HUMAIN M3, a new open-weights Arabic language model trained on over one trillion Arabic tokens, along with HUMAIN Voice, a conversational AI platform tailored for various Arabic dialects such as Saudi, Maghrebi, Egyptian, and Levantine Arabic.
Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer of HUMAIN says, "No company delivers something at this scale on its own. What you are seeing is a country rallied around a mission, with partners across the Kingdom building alongside us".
"The leadership understood early that AI is a foundational technology rather than an additive one, and everything we are building serves that vision".
HUMAIN announced a strategic alliance with Applied Intuition to implement physical AI technologies throughout Saudi Arabia, starting with self-driving trucks. The partnership seeks to create the biggest autonomous trucking network globally, with thousands of self-driving vehicles projected to function along crucial logistics routes in Saudi Arabia by 2030.
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Further announcements featured a $5 billion collaborative investment from HUMAIN and AWS in the AWS HUMAIN AI Zone, enhancing the advancement of sophisticated AI infrastructure and cloud functionalities in the Kingdom. Adobe emphasized its role in Saudi Arabia's creative economy, which has attained $4 billion in the last year through investment in digital creativity and innovation.
In the meantime, xAI revealed one of its largest international expansions so far, launching a significant data center in Saudi Arabia starting with 50MW of capacity and planning to scale up to 500MW, while AMD and HUMAIN announced the implementation of AMD's biggest inference cluster beyond the US.
LEAP organisers stated that the magnitude of investment and the involvement of worldwide technology leaders at the event indicate Saudi Arabia's expanding role as a global hub for technology investment, innovation, and infrastructure.
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Mike Champion, Co-founder of LEAP and CEO of Tahaluf says, “Since 2022, LEAP has helped establish Saudi Arabia as one of the world's most dynamic technology markets, bringing together investors, innovators and industry leaders to create tangible outcomes. As we enter the fifth year, the scale of today's announcements reflects both the maturity of the event and the Kingdom's growing influence in shaping the future of the global technology sector.”
Continuing this week and running through September 3, LEAP 2026 features a comprehensive agenda covering artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, investment, entrepreneurship, and emerging technologies.