Saudi minister signals a wider opening to Chinese technology firms

Saudi Arabia's minister of communications and information technology, Abdullah Alswaha, used the government press conference held in Riyadh ahead of LEAP 2026 to say the Kingdom expects to expand its work with Chinese technology companies, praising China's scientific and technological progress and describing Saudi Arabia as having learned a great deal from it. He was answering a question from the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Ministerial remarks at a press conference are not an agreement, and nothing was signed. What they are is a signal of intent from the minister who controls the Kingdom's digital policy agenda, delivered on the record to a Chinese state outlet on the eve of the country's largest technology event. In a week when most of the headline capital at LEAP flowed from American vendors, that is worth reading carefully. Alswaha singled out China's capability in artificial intelligence, mathematics and physics. The pairing of the last two with AI is the more interesting part of the sentence: it points at the foundational research layer rather than at products, and at the university and laboratory pipeline that produces the people who build models rather than at the models themselves. Saudi Arabia has spent several years buying finished technology. The stated ambition now runs to research capacity, and China is being named as a place to learn it from. A number of Chinese companies are exhibiting at LEAP 2026, and several are already visible in the Saudi market. Tencent Cloud arrived at the show having signed a migration and developer-tooling partnership with the logistics platform TruKKer , and Huawei is running one of the largest enterprise stands at the event under its industrial intelligence theme . Chinese hardware sits inside Saudi AI programmes too, though usually a layer down: HUMAIN's choice of Compal as its cloud-to-edge hardware partner is a Taiwanese arrangement, but the broader Asian manufacturing base behind Saudi AI infrastructure is not American. The minister has been building the relationship in person. Saudi Arabia's communications ministry has reported that Alswaha led a delegation to Shenzhen for meetings with Chinese government officials and technology executives covering artificial intelligence, the digital economy, technology transfer, space and emerging technologies, including a meeting with Huawei's David Wang on artificial intelligence and cloud computing. That visit was separate from LEAP and predates it; what the Riyadh remarks add is the public restatement of the same posture at home. The context that no one on the podium mentioned is the export-control environment. Saudi Arabia's largest AI infrastructure commitments depend on American accelerators, and those depend on American licensing decisions. A country in that position has a straightforward reason to keep a second set of relationships warm, and an equally straightforward reason not to say so out loud. The Kingdom's public line has consistently been that it partners with everyone; the practical question is how far it can do that in the segments Washington regards as sensitive. Nothing in the remarks tells you where the boundary sits. No new Chinese investment was announced at LEAP, no memorandum with a Chinese ministry was published, and no Chinese company disclosed a Saudi data-centre commitment during the week. Cooperation in AI research, digital economy policy and space is a broad enough description to cover a great deal or very little. What would make the intent concrete is narrow and testable: a Chinese vendor named in a Saudi government procurement, a joint research centre with a named Saudi university, or a Chinese cloud region announced for the Kingdom. Until one of those appears, this is a minister choosing his words in front of a Chinese audience, and choosing them warmly. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.