SDAIA opens DeepFest 2026 with speakers from 17 countries

The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority opened DeepFest 2026 in Riyadh, the AI-focused event running alongside LEAP, with a programme carrying more than 100 speakers drawn from 17 countries. DeepFest is the specialist counterpart to LEAP's broad technology floor: where the main event spans fintech, gaming, space, health technology and everything between, DeepFest concentrates on artificial intelligence and the data infrastructure underneath it. Running the two together gives the Kingdom a general technology exhibition and a dedicated AI conference in the same week and the same venue. SDAIA's ownership of the event is the detail that gives it weight. The authority is not a sponsor lending a name to a conference; it is the body that sets Saudi Arabia's national data and AI policy, runs the national data management framework, and is the regulator behind the rules governing how personal data is handled in the Kingdom. When SDAIA convenes the AI industry, it does so as the entity that will decide what that industry is permitted to do. That regulatory function has been visible in its programme of work. SDAIA has been running a sandbox initiative to let organisations test AI systems under supervision before deploying them, an approach that gives a regulator visibility into what is being built while giving builders a route to approval that does not depend on guessing at the rules. The seventeen-country speaker roster reflects a deliberate positioning. Saudi Arabia has spent the past two years arguing that it should be a place where AI is developed rather than only bought, and international participation is part of the case. The Kingdom's officials have been explicit at this event about wanting to connect AI ecosystems between East and West, with the country positioned as a meeting point rather than a customer of either. DeepFest has carried a substantial share of the week's technical announcements. Oracle and AMD used it to set out a 50,000-GPU supercluster , BIOSTAR launched industrial edge AI systems there , and AI Geo Navigators unveiled a Saudi hazard and climate screening platform across both events . The authority has been active on its own account as well, having launched the SAMAI 2 procurement framework covering eleven ministries during the same week — a piece of machinery that matters more to the Saudi AI market than any single vendor announcement, because it determines how government departments buy. Speaker counts and country tallies are the least informative numbers a conference produces, and they should be read as a measure of convening power rather than of output. What DeepFest is genuinely useful for is the density: it puts the regulator, the state AI company, the hyperscalers and the local software industry in one hall for four days, which is where the agreements announced across this week were mostly arranged. The programme runs to 3 September alongside LEAP. DeepFest has grown alongside LEAP since the main event's early editions, and the decision to give AI its own branded programme rather than a track reflects how much of the Kingdom's technology agenda now runs through it. Almost every significant Saudi technology announcement of the past two years has had an AI component, whether infrastructure, models, government services or industrial application. The authority's dual role — convening the industry while regulating it — is common in Gulf technology policy and less common elsewhere, where those functions are usually separated. It has an obvious advantage in speed: a regulator that sits in the room while the sector plans can adjust rules to what is actually being built rather than to what it assumes is being built. The corresponding risk is that the regulated and the regulator become difficult to tell apart. For companies exhibiting, the practical value of DeepFest is proximity to the buyer and the rule-maker at the same time. Saudi government entities are among the largest AI purchasers in the region, and their procurement runs through frameworks SDAIA and its counterparts define. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.