At SuperReturn Middle East, BECO Capital’s Managing Partner Abdulaziz Shikh Al Sagha sat down with Bader Saad, Director at Alix Partners, to discuss how Saudi Arabia is building an AI-powered economy through infrastructure, partnerships, and stakeholder readiness that’s accelerating the shift from pilots to production faster than many regions.
The Three Building Blocks: Infrastructure, Data, and Stakeholder Readiness
Regardless of geography, building AI companies requires three fundamental elements, which Saudi Arabia has been methodically assembling.
1. Infrastructure: Compute and Connectivity
Access to cutting-edge compute was a constraint until recently and GPUs available in the Kingdom weren’t the latest models until about a year ago, which was notable given the market potential. Over the past year, rapid infrastructure upgrades have changed this landscape. Today, hyperscalers including Google, Amazon, and Oracle provide Saudi founders with access to state-of-the-art GPUs and compute power: the essential building blocks for AI development.
Connectivity infrastructure has evolved alongside compute capacity. The Kingdom has invested heavily in network infrastructure, including laying fibre underwater sea cables to create robust connectivity across the country. This backbone enables IoT devices and edge computing across the country, including in rural areas. That connectivity becomes critical as AI applications move beyond data centers and into real-world deployment.
This is all underpinned by access to vast amounts of affordable electricity and power which is the backbone for their efforts. In certain parts of the world Microsoft has GPUs sitting idle in data centers due to the lack of electricity to power them, a dynamic that would never happen in a country like Saudi Arabia.
2. Data: Accessible and Structured
The Kingdom has digitized over 130 government databases, making them accessible to founders via APIs. Saudi Arabia has also built a data-sharing marketplace with 250+ datasets available in real time.
For AI-powered fintech companies, this infrastructure solves a critical problem. For example, a fintech company may need to check in real-time whether a customer qualifies for a loan based on various parameters and scores. That data access, previously fragmented or unavailable, is now instantaneously accessible.
3. Stakeholder Readiness: The Underrated Factor
Infrastructure and data matter, but stakeholder readiness may be the most critical element. Capital alone doesn’t create customers. Without stakeholders ready to consume new products, even well-funded companies struggle to gain traction.
In Saudi, stakeholders across the spectrum (from government agencies to SMEs) are actively seeking to run POCs, adopt technology, and iterate with startups both regionally and internationally. For AI founders, having design partners to build and grow with is invaluable. National programs are seeding anchor customers across government, energy, logistics, finance, health, and Arabic language AI so pilots don’t die in POCs; they convert to paid deployments faster than in most markets, enabling founders to scale on “day one demand.”
The market mentality has rightfully shifted from “build slow and run fast” to “build fast and sell fast.” With competition coming not just from startups but from big tech and sovereign players, speed matters. Building fast means iterating in real time. The Saudi market has embraced this responsive mentality, working closely with early-stage founders.
An Emerging Regional Playbook
Saudi Arabia’s approach to AI represents a successful regional model, alongside the UAE, whereby a sovereign-driven AI ecosystem is built, combining research institutions with commercialization vehicles (for more depth on this subject, we invite you to read BECO’s AI whitepaper).
Very few countries globally have managed to cut through bureaucracy and move at this speed. Saudi Arabia began this journey in the early 2020s. A key milestone came in August 2024 when talks of a national AI champion emerged which eventually resulted in the launch of Humain on May 12 2025, which consolidated fragmented entities under one brand to eliminate bureaucratic friction.
Humain: Building the Full Stack
Humain represents Saudi Arabia’s systematic approach to building vertically integrated AI capability. Through a $10 billion venture fund, Humain invests for financial returns, to attract global AI companies to the Kingdom, and to build local partnerships.
Humain functions as Saudi Arabia’s equivalent of AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, but government-backed and designed to build for the region first. Their strategy centers on building the full stack: combining infrastructure, research, venture funding, and applications under one roof. They’re bringing in global talent and partnering with leading companies to build from Saudi, for Saudi, with the medium-term goal of exporting this innovation abroad.
Their partnership with Groq illustrates this approach. Inference (real-time prediction and decision-making based on streaming data) is becoming increasingly important as AI systems move from training to deployment. Humain now operates the largest inference cluster in EMEA. This infrastructure is laying the groundwork for future applications that will be built on top of the Humain sovereign cloud architecture.
Economic Returns: Physical and Digital Layers
The economic returns from Saudi Arabia’s AI investments operate on two levels.
Companies like Humain will generate recurring revenue every time AI tokens are consumed. Consumption scales endlessly as data and applications grow, creating sustained revenue potential.
Industry Impact: Where AI is Making a Difference Today
AI is permeating every industry, transforming core business functions. Functions like marketing, business development, and finance have been transformed by AI tools. Tasks that previously required 30 or 40 people can now be accomplished by two, because intelligent automation has fundamentally changed workflows.
Cleargrid – a BECO portfolio company – is an example of such transformation, smoothing the customer experience while driving significant efficiencies, by automating debt collection via AI agents. Traditional debt collection involves humans using often ineffective, aggressive and unpleasant methods. Cleargrid, by contrast, has trained AI on millions of data points from banks and BNPL providers and now handles over hundreds of thousands of calls daily and growing, with no human involvement, using data driven tactics that maximize the probability of repayment as well as the ability to scale without the need to hire more people.
Other notable industry sectors in the Kingdom that are being transformed by AI include energy and logistics:
Some industries will feel AI’s impact sooner than others. But the foundational ROI is already visible across all sectors.