DeepFest fills its floor with 120 AI brands and 180 speakers

DeepFest, the artificial intelligence event co-located with LEAP at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre, ran its 2026 edition with more than 120 global AI brands on the exhibition floor, over 180 speakers and a projected 68,000 visitors across the four days. The exhibitor and sponsor roster is where the event's character shows. Google Cloud, AMD, Blaize, Cerebras, Supermicro, Salesforce, EY and Xerox are named among the companies taking space, and the mix is telling: two silicon companies building accelerators for large model training, a systems builder, a hyperscale cloud provider, an enterprise software vendor, a professional services firm and a document and imaging business. That is a floor weighted towards the machinery of AI rather than towards applications. Cerebras and Blaize are the more specialised of those names. Cerebras builds wafer-scale processors aimed at training and inference workloads that do not fit comfortably on conventional accelerator boards, and Blaize works at the other end of the range, on low-power edge inference. Supermicro assembles the rack-level systems that house other people's chips. Between them they cover most of the physical layer that a country building sovereign AI capacity has to buy. The 68,000 visitor projection is a separate count from LEAP's own attendance, though the two events share a venue and a badge, and organiser figures of this kind are not independently audited. The speaker count is worth noting for a different reason: DeepFest's opening session put the roster at more than 100 speakers drawn from 17 countries, while pre-event material described more than 180 speakers overall. Those numbers are measuring different things — a conference programme and an opening statement about it — and neither has been reconciled by the organisers. DeepFest is organised in the context of Saudi Arabia designating 2026 its Year of Artificial Intelligence, an initiative backed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority. SDAIA opened the event , with the director of its National Information Center framing the programme around AI applications in business. The programme spans AI governance, sovereign infrastructure and autonomous systems on the policy side, and healthcare, supply chains, media and the creator economy on the application side. That breadth is characteristic of national AI events and is also their weakness: a track structure that covers everything tends to produce sessions that agree with each other. What gives this edition more substance than a conference agenda usually carries is that the buildout it discusses is happening in the same city. Announcements at the co-located LEAP included the first AMD Instinct systems going live for HUMAIN and HUMAIN's release of an open-weights Arabic model . The vendors on the DeepFest floor are selling into a market that is buying at scale, which is not true of every AI conference in the region. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.