LEAP 2026 closes with nearly $15 billion in announced investments and agreements

LEAP 2026 closed in Riyadh on 3 September with organisers valuing the announcements, investments and agreements made during the week at nearly $15 billion, spanning AI infrastructure, data centres, cloud computing, technology manufacturing and venture capital. That figure will be quoted for the next twelve months, so it is worth taking apart while the underlying announcements are still fresh. The fifth edition ran from 31 August to 3 September at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham. Organisers reported 1,323 speakers and 1,397 investors drawn from 1,027 firms across 72 countries, representing $18.3 trillion in assets under management. More than 1,500 exhibitors took part, including over 750 companies from outside Saudi Arabia, and 1,294 companies participated across the exhibition and the startup programme. The first thing to understand about the closing number is that it is not the sum of the daily totals. Organisers put day two at more than $2.5 billion and day three at $857 million. Several outlets reported that day one alone carried more than $15 billion. Add those together and you pass the closing figure comfortably, which means the daily releases and the closing statement are counting on different bases. The most defensible reading is that the closing total is a cumulative event figure in which the two largest day-one announcements do most of the work, not a running tally that can be added up. What can be reconstructed deal by deal is more useful. The largest single disclosed number of the week came from Amazon Web Services, which confirmed that its first Saudi cloud region is on track to open in December 2026 and put the investment behind it at more than $5.3 billion. AWS also said its expanded partnership with HUMAIN would make up to 50 megawatts of capacity available in the country's first AI Zone by 2028. Both are forward commitments with dates attached rather than money already spent. The other day-one anchor was the AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN partnership, which announced on 31 August that AMD Instinct MI355X systems running on Cisco networking had gone live in Saudi Arabia and were serving HUMAIN customers in the Kingdom and beyond. The companies said they plan to add up to 250 megawatts of AI infrastructure starting in 2027 and remain on track for as much as one gigawatt by 2030. This is the one large announcement of the week with something already switched on behind it, although the live portion is a fraction of the planned build. Day two was led by Al Moammar Information Systems, which announced a $1.2 billion investment to expand its data centre estate and take total operational capacity to 192 megawatts. That single announcement accounts for roughly half of the day's $2.5 billion figure, with the balance spread across cloud services, technology localisation and research and development. Day three is the one part of the week where the arithmetic is fully disclosed. Of the $857 million announced, close to $293 million was venture activity across 11 deals. That divided into nine funding rounds worth a combined $126.15 million and two fund items, a new fund launch and the expansion of an existing fund, worth $166.7 million together. Among the fund announcements was a $100 million vehicle from Ula Capital in partnership with Korea's FuturePlay, aimed at deep tech opportunities between the two countries. The rounds themselves were spread across AI, fintech, travel, gaming, human resources and digital automotive services. Set that against the headline and the shape of the week becomes clear. Roughly $126 million of primary capital actually went into startups, which is about eight tenths of one percent of the closing total. Everything else is infrastructure commitment, planned regional investment, localisation programmes and agreements whose value depends on execution over three to five years. That is not a criticism of the number so much as a caution about how it is read. A commitment to spend $5.3 billion on a cloud region opening in December is a real and checkable thing. It is a different kind of fact from a data centre fund that still needs regulatory approval, and different again from megawatts that will not be energised until 2028. The closing statement grouped all of it under one figure, and without a published category breakdown, readers cannot separate the three. The proof points are dated, which makes the next year unusually easy to audit. The AWS region is supposed to open in December. The additional 250 megawatts from AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN is supposed to start in 2027. The first 100 megawatts of the HUMAIN and DataVolt build at Oxagon in NEOM is expected to become available in 2028. LEAP returns to Riyadh from 12 to 15 April 2027, which gives the market about seven months to see how many of those dates hold.