Center3 in Saudi Arabia’s AI Compute Landscape
Center3 occupies a structural position in Saudi Arabia’s AI compute buildout that is easy to underestimate: it provides the neutral physical ground on which the Kingdom’s AI compute ecosystem interconnects. In a landscape dominated by headlines about GPU clusters, sovereign AI models, and billion-dollar hyperscaler investments, Center3 delivers the unglamorous but foundational infrastructure layer — carrier-neutral colocation, internet exchange, and subsea cable access — without which the AI compute ambitions of Humain, SDAIA, and the Kingdom’s hyperscaler partners cannot reach their end users.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Riyadh, Center3 was established specifically to address a gap in Saudi Arabia’s digital infrastructure: the absence of a carrier-neutral facility where competing telecoms operators, hyperscalers, and enterprises could interconnect without routing traffic through a single dominant carrier’s network. In most mature digital markets, carrier-neutral colocation and internet exchange operate independently of the major telecoms operators, enabling competitive pricing and resilient routing. Saudi Arabia’s digital infrastructure had historically been dominated by stc’s network, with interconnection occurring on stc’s terms. Center3 was designed to change that dynamic, and over the decade since its founding it has become the neutral ground that the Saudi digital economy depends on.
The company operates Tier III certified data centers in Riyadh and Jeddah, giving it a geographic presence across both the Kingdom’s primary business hub and its primary Red Sea port and cable landing location. Tier III certification — N+1 redundancy across all critical systems, 99.982% availability — represents the minimum standard acceptable for the enterprise and carrier customers that Center3 serves. The Riyadh facility anchors the Saudi Internet Exchange (SAIX), which is the primary peering point for internet traffic entering and leaving the Kingdom. This makes Center3 not merely a landlord for server hardware, but the operator of critical internet infrastructure with a mandate that extends to national digital resilience.
As NVIDIA GPUs, Intel Gaudi accelerators, and AMD Instinct cards arrive in Saudi Arabia to populate Humain’s AI compute campus and hyperscaler deployments, Center3 provides the interconnection fabric that allows these compute resources to be reached by Saudi enterprises, government agencies, and eventually AI service consumers across the broader MENA region. The physical infrastructure layer — power, cooling, cross-connects, and diverse fiber entry — that Center3 maintains is the foundation on which the Kingdom’s AI compute ambitions become commercially accessible.
Strategic Significance
Center3’s strategic significance in the Saudi AI compute ecosystem derives from three interlocking capabilities: carrier-neutral colocation that enables competitive interconnection, the Saudi Internet Exchange (SAIX) that sits at the heart of the Kingdom’s internet architecture, and subsea cable landing access that connects Saudi Arabia’s digital infrastructure to the global internet backbone.
Carrier neutrality is more strategically important in the AI era than it was in the enterprise IT era. AI inference services — the workload that will dominate Saudi AI compute consumption once Humain’s training infrastructure is operational — are extraordinarily latency-sensitive for user-facing applications. Arabic-language voice assistants, real-time translation services, and AI-assisted government digital services all require inference latency below 50 milliseconds to deliver acceptable user experiences. Achieving that latency from a compute cluster to a Saudi end user requires optimal network routing, and optimal routing is only possible when compute operators, content delivery networks, and internet service providers can interconnect at neutral facilities with minimal hop counts and without commercial barriers.
Center3’s SAIX exchange point provides exactly this capability. By hosting the Saudi Internet Exchange at its Riyadh facility, Center3 enables direct peering between the hyperscalers operating AI inference endpoints — Microsoft Azure’s Saudi North region, Google Cloud’s Saudi Arabia region, Oracle Cloud’s Jeddah region — and the Saudi ISPs delivering those services to end users. Without a functioning internet exchange, Saudi AI inference traffic would route internationally before returning to Saudi end users, adding 80–150 milliseconds of latency that would render real-time AI applications non-competitive. SAIX, operating from Center3’s infrastructure, eliminates this problem.
The joint venture between Center3 and stc for AI compute campus development represents a structural evolution of Center3’s role from neutral infrastructure operator to active participant in Saudi AI deployment. The JV framework creates a vehicle through which Center3’s carrier-neutral colocation expertise and stc’s fiber infrastructure and power grid relationships can be combined to develop AI compute campuses — facilities specifically engineered for the high-density power and cooling demands of GPU clusters — at multiple sites across the Kingdom. This positions Center3 not merely as a beneficiary of the AI compute buildout but as a developer of the next generation of Saudi digital infrastructure.
Subsea cable access through Center3’s Jeddah facility adds a dimension that goes beyond domestic interconnection. Saudi Arabia sits at the intersection of multiple subsea cable systems connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, and Jeddah is one of the primary landing points for those cables. Center3’s access to these landing systems — through cable landing station connectivity and direct cable system participation — means that Saudi AI compute operators who colocate at Center3 can access international bandwidth on favorable terms, relevant for training workloads that require pulling large datasets from international repositories and for serving AI inference to Saudi diaspora users and MENA regional customers.
The power infrastructure development that the stc JV enables is particularly significant given the density requirements of modern AI compute. A single rack of NVIDIA H100 SXM servers draws 40–60 kilowatts of power, compared to 5–10 kilowatts for a typical enterprise compute rack. Center3’s traditional Tier III facilities were engineered for enterprise density; the AI compute campus development under the stc JV is being designed from the ground up for AI-density power delivery, liquid cooling infrastructure, and the redundant high-voltage substations that large GPU clusters require.
Operational Context
Center3’s operational footprint consists of its two certified data center facilities, the SAIX internet exchange, and the expanding AI compute campus development program undertaken through its JV with stc. The Riyadh facility is the larger of the two and serves as the primary interconnection hub for the Saudi digital economy. Customers include stc, Mobily, and Zain — Saudi Arabia’s three major telecoms operators — as well as the Saudi affiliates of international hyperscalers, CDN operators, and enterprise customers requiring Riyadh-based colocation for regulatory compliance with Saudi data localization requirements.
The Jeddah facility provides geographic redundancy and, critically, direct access to the subsea cable systems that land in Jeddah’s cable landing stations. The Saudi Arabia-East Africa submarine cable system, the India-Europe Gateway cable, and the AAE-1 cable system all land in or near Jeddah, making Center3’s Jeddah facility the natural interconnection point for Saudi operators who need to access bandwidth on these international routes without routing through international internet exchanges.
SAIX — the Saudi Arabia Internet Exchange — operates from Center3’s infrastructure and has grown substantially as the Kingdom’s digital economy has expanded. Internet exchange traffic volumes in Saudi Arabia have grown at a compound rate exceeding 30% annually since 2020, driven by streaming content consumption, cloud adoption, and increasingly, AI service delivery. As Humain’s AI compute infrastructure begins delivering inference services at national scale, the exchange traffic volumes carried by SAIX will increase dramatically, as AI service traffic tends to be high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive.
The stc JV for AI compute campus development is in active site selection and engineering design phases as of 2025. The JV is evaluating sites in Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District, the industrial corridor south of Riyadh, and the Neom project zone for specialized edge AI deployments. Each site presents different trade-offs between power grid access, fiber connectivity, land cost, and proximity to the end users that will consume AI inference services. The JV’s approach of combining Center3’s neutral colocation expertise with stc’s infrastructure relationships positions it to develop facilities that can attract the full ecosystem of AI compute operators — hyperscalers, Humain, and Saudi enterprise customers — to a single carrier-neutral campus.
Center3’s customer relationships with international hyperscalers are operationally active across both existing facilities. Microsoft Azure, which operates the Saudi North Azure region from data centers in the Riyadh area, uses Center3 for internet interconnection and CDN point-of-presence hosting. Google Cloud’s Saudi Arabia region, announced and under development, is expected to leverage Center3 infrastructure for SAIX peering. These relationships give Center3 direct operational insight into the infrastructure requirements of hyperscale AI deployments, informing the engineering specifications for the AI compute campuses the stc JV is developing.
Connections to the Broader Saudi Ecosystem
Center3’s connections to the Saudi AI compute ecosystem are structural rather than programmatic — the company is embedded in the infrastructure layer that every other player in the ecosystem depends on, rather than being a named partner in specific AI development initiatives. This structural embeddedness makes Center3’s ecosystem relationships both deeper and more durable than project-level partnerships.
The relationship with Humain is foundational. Humain’s AI compute campus — which will host the NVIDIA H100 and H200 clusters at the core of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign AI infrastructure — requires carrier-neutral interconnection to deliver its AI inference services to Saudi enterprises and government agencies at acceptable latency. Center3’s SAIX exchange and its Riyadh colocation facility are the most direct path to achieving that interconnection without routing traffic through stc’s carrier network, which would introduce both commercial dependency and potential latency overhead. As Humain scales its compute capacity and begins delivering commercial AI services, its network interconnection strategy will increasingly converge on Center3’s infrastructure.
The stc JV creates a direct relationship with the Kingdom’s largest telecoms operator and one of the PIF’s most strategically important portfolio assets. stc’s fiber infrastructure connects Saudi Arabia’s 32 governorates, and its relationship with Center3 through the JV gives Center3 access to that nationwide connectivity fabric for distributing AI compute capabilities beyond the major metropolitan areas. This matters for Vision 2030’s goal of digitizing Saudi Arabia’s entire economy, including the agricultural, industrial, and tourism sectors in secondary cities and rural areas that depend on stc’s network for connectivity.
MCIT’s digital infrastructure mandate creates policy-level alignment with Center3’s mission. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has made carrier-neutral internet exchange infrastructure a priority under its Cloud First policy and its data center efficiency standards. Center3’s operation of SAIX positions it as a strategic national infrastructure asset from MCIT’s perspective, creating a relationship that goes beyond commercial customer-vendor dynamics to encompass policy consultation and infrastructure planning participation.
The relationships with Mobily and Zain — through SAIX peering and direct colocation services — ensure that Center3 maintains neutral relationships across the entire Saudi telecom sector. This neutrality is Center3’s primary asset, and the company’s governance and operations are structured to maintain it even as the stc JV deepens a specific commercial relationship with the dominant carrier.
Outlook: 3–5 Year Trajectory
Center3’s growth trajectory over the 2025–2030 period will track the Saudi AI compute buildout directly, with the AI compute campus JV with stc serving as the primary vehicle for that growth. The immediate opportunity is the physical infrastructure development pipeline: designing, permitting, constructing, and commissioning AI-density data center facilities in Riyadh and potentially in Jeddah and Neom. The capital intensity of this pipeline is high — a 50-megawatt AI compute campus requires $400–600 million in construction and electrical infrastructure investment — and the stc JV structure provides access to the balance sheet capacity and infrastructure relationships that Center3 alone could not mobilize.
The internet exchange business will scale with AI traffic volumes. SAIX traffic is projected to grow at 40–50% annually through 2027 as AI inference services, streaming AI-generated content, and AI-assisted government digital services create new traffic categories. Center3’s position as SAIX operator means it captures the interconnection revenue associated with this growth while also accumulating the operational data on Saudi internet traffic patterns that informs its facility design and expansion decisions.
Subsea cable investment is an emerging priority. The Saudi government’s decision to participate directly in new subsea cable systems — including cable systems connecting Saudi Arabia more directly to Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa as part of Vision 2030’s trade diversification agenda — creates opportunities for Center3 to deepen its cable landing and backhaul infrastructure in Jeddah. A Center3 facility that combines AI compute colocation with diverse subsea cable access would serve as a regional AI hub for the broader Middle East and East Africa, extending Center3’s relevance well beyond the Saudi domestic market.