Turkish contracting firm Dogus Construction has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Saudi Arabia's local telecommunication firm Advanced Communications & Electronics Systems Company (Aces) to develop data centre projects in Saudi Arabia.

The MoU was signed on the sidelines of the Leap Technology Conference in Riyadh this week.

Dogus Construction is headquartered in Istanbul, Turkiye. The contractor has been involved in some significant projects, including the Yerkoy to Kayseri high-speed rail, the Qatar Rayyan infrastructure project, the Artvin Dam, the Cekmekoy to Yenidogan Metro, and the Istanbul Metro scheme.

Saudi Arabia aims to become a digital hub and a key player in artificial intelligence (AI), both of which require enormous cloud computing-based resources.

MEED reported on 7 March that newly formed Saudi digital infrastructure developer DataVolt had announced a plan to invest $5bn in developing data centres across the kingdom.

The data centres are expected to have a capacity exceeding 300MW.

DataVolt's planned investment follows an announcement by US-headquartered Amazon Web Services (AWS) that it plans to launch a new AWS Region in Saudi Arabia in 2026 as part of its long-term commitment to invest more than $5.3bn in the kingdom.

According to GlobalData, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM lead the global infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service markets, which are key building blocks in the evolving cloud computing technology stack.

Other announcements at this year's Leap technology conference in Riyadh include US tech company IBM's plans to invest $250m in establishing a global software development centre. Another US-based software firm, ServiceNow, is allocating $500m to localise its regional services in Saudi Arabia.

Dell Technologies announced plans to open a manufacturing and fulfilment centre in Saudi Arabia. State-backed Saudi Aramco also announced the establishment of the Saudi Accelerator Innovation Laboratory in partnership with the Ministry of Communications & IT.

Aramco also introduced a generative AI model called "Metabrain" and the "Aramco large language model (LLM)" at Leap this year.