LEAP 2026 opened in Riyadh with more than $15 billion in technology investments and strategic commitments, highlighting Saudi Arabia’s growing influence in the global technology and innovation landscape.

Opening the fifth edition, Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha pointed to the rapid expansion of the Kingdom’s digital economy. Since LEAP began in 2022, Saudi Arabia’s digital economy has grown by 69%, reaching an estimated $199 billion, while women now account for 36% of the technology workforce.

Tareq Amin, Chief Executive Officer of HUMAIN, said: “No company delivers something at this scale on its own. What you are seeing is a country rallied around a mission, with partners across the Kingdom building alongside us. The leadership understood early that AI is a foundational technology rather than an additive one, and everything we are building serves that vision.”

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The opening day featured announcements covering artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and autonomous technologies. HUMAIN introduced HUMAIN M3, an open-weights Arabic language model trained on more than one trillion Arabic tokens, as well as HUMAIN Voice, a platform designed to support several Arabic dialects.

HUMAIN also announced a partnership with Applied Intuition focused on autonomous trucking, with plans to develop a large-scale network of autonomous vehicles across Saudi logistics routes. Other announcements included a $5 billion HUMAIN-AWS investment in AI infrastructure, an expanded xAI data-centre deployment and AMD’s largest inference cluster outside the US in partnership with HUMAIN.

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LEAP 2026 runs through September 3, featuring programmes focused on AI, digital infrastructure, investment and emerging technologies.