LEAP 2026 opens its fifth edition with more than 200,000 attendees

LEAP opened its fifth edition at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham with organisers putting attendance at more than 200,000, alongside 1,800 technology brands, 1,000 speakers, 1,900 investors and 600 startups, spread across 16 stages and more than 20 programme tracks. The show runs from 31 August to 3 September under the theme “Into New Worlds”. It is organised by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones together with Tahaluf, the joint venture the federation runs with the events group Informa and the Events Investment Fund. Every one of those numbers comes from the organisers rather than from an independent audit, which is the normal position at trade shows and worth stating plainly. Attendance at LEAP is counted as engaged attendees rather than unique badge-holders, a measure that includes people returning across the four days. The comparable figure organisers projected before the doors opened was 201,000, so the opening statement is a confirmation of the forecast rather than a surprise. What the count does establish is scale relative to the rest of the calendar. A four-day exhibition holding 1,800 exhibiting brands needs a venue with the floor plate to take them, and the Malham site north of Riyadh was built for exactly that. The 16 stages matter more than the headline attendance for anyone trying to work out what actually happened at the show: with more than 20 tracks running in parallel across fintech, healthtech, smart cities, edtech, sports tech, space, gaming and digital infrastructure, no attendee sees more than a fraction of the programme, and announcements land in rooms that hold a few hundred people. The 1,900 investors are the figure the Saudi organisers push hardest, because the pitch LEAP makes to founders is access to capital rather than access to a booth. The startup and investor programme is built around that promise, and 600 startups is the supply side of it. This edition sits in an unusual slot. LEAP normally runs in the spring, and the 2026 show was moved from April to the end of August , which put it into the last week of the northern summer and against a different set of competing events. Whether that cost or gained attendance is not something the published figures answer, since the organisers have not put out a like-for-like comparison with the April 2025 edition. DeepFest, the artificial intelligence event co-located with LEAP, runs on the same dates and is counted separately. It opened with the Saudi Data and AI Authority setting out a speaker roster drawn from 17 countries , and it carries its own exhibition floor and stage programme inside the same venue. The commercial claim attached to the opening — that the first day produced more than $15 billion in technology launches, investments and partnerships — is a Saudi government figure, stated by officials at the show, and it aggregates announcements of very different kinds: signed contracts, memoranda of understanding, construction starts and multi-year infrastructure commitments that will be spent over years. It is not a measure of money that has changed hands. TechScoop is covering the individual announcements as they are made rather than the totals. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.