What stood out at LEAP 2026
An article by Abdullah Al Jaafari, CEO and Founder of Resquad AI Somewhere on the second day in Riyadh, I stopped photographing the robots and started noticing the lanyards. LEAP 2026 has a badge tier that sits above VIP. It is called VVIP. Two Vs. I kept seeing it in the corridors of the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center, and that small piece of plastic explained the week better than any…
The second day of LEAP 2026 in Riyadh was marked by a shift from discussing AI to experiencing AI as an integral part of various industries. One notable example was the introduction of local AI infrastructure, with AMD, Cisco, and HUMAIN announcing the launch of production AI infrastructure powered by AMD Instinct GPUs in Saudi Arabia. This infrastructure was expected to serve customers and mark the beginning of a larger expansion, with up to 250 megawatts of additional AI infrastructure set to be built by 2027.
Another key development was the growing role of the Saudi government in the technology sector. The government acted as both a convener and a major customer, with 62 government entities recognized for integrating 926 government services into Tawakkalna, a platform with over 36 million users and handling more than 85 million transactions daily. This proactive approach to technology was a departure from the traditional role of most governments, which primarily focus on regulation and occasional subsidies.
Agentic AI also saw significant progress during LEAP 2026. Companies like HUMAIN and Microsoft planned to offer AI-powered productivity bundles to enterprise customers, with HUMAIN ONE to become available alongside Microsoft 365, including Copilot, as an AI productivity bundle for enterprise customers, targeting 1 million users across the Middle East and Africa. The integration of AI agents into existing enterprise workflows shortened the distance between experimentation and everyday use.
Arabic-first products moved from aspiration to deployment during the event. HUMAIN's ALLAM Arabic-language model was set to become available through Amazon Bedrock, bringing Arabic-language AI capabilities into one of the world's major enterprise generative AI platforms. Adobe also announced that it would move AI workloads onto HUMAIN's infrastructure, migrating regional AI data-captioning workloads to locally hosted infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. This shift highlighted the growing importance of data residency as part of the product proposition.
Written by urgent.news from Wamda's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
