Saudi Energy signs three deals to power the Kingdom's AI data centres

Saudi Arabia's national power utility signed three agreements at LEAP 2026 aimed at supplying electricity to the data centres and AI infrastructure the Kingdom is racing to build, addressing what has quietly become a binding constraint on the country's AI ambitions: not compute, but power. The first agreement is between National Grid SA and HUMAIN, the state-backed AI company at the centre of most of Saudi Arabia's AI infrastructure announcements this year. It covers electricity supply for HUMAIN's AI data-centre project in Riyadh, and is framed as support for the project's electrical infrastructure and its future energy requirements — language that describes a supply and grid-connection arrangement rather than a specific committed capacity figure or delivery date. The second and third agreements involve the Saudi Electricity Project Development Company, known as PDC, a subsidiary of Saudi Energy responsible for developing power-generation and infrastructure projects. PDC signed a framework agreement with center3, the data-centre and connectivity arm of stc Group, to establish what the companies describe as a strategic partnership covering future data-centre and energy-infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia. A framework agreement of this kind typically sets out the terms under which specific projects will later be developed and financed, rather than committing to a named site or a fixed amount of capacity up front. Power has become the practical bottleneck behind almost every AI infrastructure announcement coming out of Saudi Arabia this year. A modern AI data centre draws enormous, continuous electrical load — HUMAIN and DataVolt's own 360-megawatt project at NEOM's Oxagon industrial city is one example already under construction — and that load has to come from somewhere on a grid that also has to serve everything else the country needs. Announcing a data-centre project and actually connecting it to enough reliable power are two different achievements, and the gap between them is where a number of ambitious AI infrastructure plans elsewhere in the world have stalled. These agreements are Saudi Energy positioning itself as the entity solving that second half of the problem, in step with the AI infrastructure buildout rather than reacting to it afterward. That framing is also why these deals, unglamorous as utility agreements tend to be next to a chip partnership or a model launch, matter more than their billing as a strategic-sponsor contribution to LEAP might suggest. HUMAIN's compute ambitions — its AMD Instinct GPU systems going live, its cloud and AI Zone plans with AWS — are only as real as the power available to run them continuously. A national grid operator publicly committing to supply a specific project is a signal that the electrical side of the plan has a named counterparty, even before the underlying capacity numbers are public. None of the three agreements published a capacity figure, a connection date, or a financial value. "Meet future energy requirements" and a "strategic partnership... in future data centre and energy infrastructure projects" are both language that commits the parties to work together without specifying on what scale or by when. The deals extend a pattern already visible elsewhere at LEAP this week: the MCIT-HUMAIN framework agreement on national AI infrastructure and HUMAIN and DataVolt's 100-megawatt data-centre groundbreaking at NEOM both ultimately depend on exactly the kind of grid-supply arrangement Saudi Energy signed with National Grid SA this week. The Insurance Authority's own cooperation agreement with HUMAIN is a reminder of how many different arms of the Saudi state are now transacting with the same AI company in parallel. Whether the power actually arrives on the schedule HUMAIN's compute buildout needs is the harder question, and one none of this week's agreements answer. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.