Saudi Arabia is not only investing in AI — it is building the infrastructure, talent, and ecosystem needed to develop it locally.
In an exclusive interview with MENA TECH, Madhavi Reddy, Managing Director for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at Amazon Web Services (AWS), discusses the company’s $10.3 billion investment in Saudi Arabia and what it could mean for the Kingdom’s growing AI economy.
The investment includes $5.3 billion for the AWS Saudi Arabia Region, alongside another $5 billion with HUMAIN to build a full-stack AI platform spanning infrastructure, models, applications and advanced AI services.
Reddy also explains how AWS plans to support Saudi developers and startups through local infrastructure, innovation hubs and training programs, including an initiative aimed at training 100,000 developers in the Kingdom.
The conversation explores sovereign AI and data residency, lower-latency cloud infrastructure, and how Saudi-built models such as ALLaM can be deployed through Amazon Bedrock both inside the Kingdom and globally.
But infrastructure is only part of the equation. Reddy highlights the AI skills gap as one of the biggest barriers to adoption, while AWS aims to expand cloud and AI training across the region and make advanced AI tools accessible to a much broader developer community.
For AWS, the next phase of AI is about choice, local capabilities and giving more developers the tools to build — rather than locking them into a single model or platform.
