Saudi Arabia’s AI progress spans talent, infrastructure and government adoption, finds SDAIA study

The Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) has published a study assessing the Kingdom’s progress in artificial intelligence (AI), covering seven key pillars and 15 sub-pillars, including regulation, investment, digital infrastructure, data governance, human capital, research and innovation, and institutional adoption.

The report highlights Saudi Arabia’s rankings across several international benchmarks. The kingdom ranked third globally for AI talent growth in the 2026 Stanford HAI Index, third globally and first regionally for developing leading AI models in the 2025 index, and fifth for AI sector growth in the 2025 Observer Index.

It also secured 26 awards at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth and joined the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in 2026.

In digital infrastructure, Saudi Arabia’s data center capacity grew by 115.8% between 2023 and 2025.

Its computing infrastructure includes the Shaheen III supercomputer, which ranked first in the GCC on the 2026 TOP500 list, and the Hexagon Data Center, a government-owned Tier IV facility with a capacity of 480 megawatts.

By mid-2026, the Kingdom had nine hyperscale cloud regions, with four additional facilities under development by global providers.

The report also outlined growth in the country’s data ecosystem. A total of 515 government systems had been integrated into the National Data Lake under the National Data Bank by 2026, consolidating 5.87 petabytes of data from more than 90 government entities. Open datasets exceeded 21,800 and were contributed by 346 public- and private-sector organizations.

Saudi Arabia also used more than 500 billion Arabic data units to develop its ALLaM 34B large language model in 2025. Meanwhile, the King Salman Global Academy for Arabic Language’s Falak platform reached 2.2 billion words.

The study found that 84% of the Saudi public was familiar with AI, while more than 1.2 million people had joined the first phase of the SAMAI initiative by July 2026.

Between 2021 and 2025, over 69,300 technical graduates entered the labor market, with domestic AI talent density growing at a 15% compound annual rate.

AI research publications grew by 37.4% annually between 2021 and 2025, while patent filings increased by 34.52% between 2020 and 2024. The Kingdom also developed eight large language models and 58 specialised AI applications, according to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology’s 2026 report.

In government, 90% of entities had an AI strategy, and 97% were deploying or developing AI tools. Additionally, 77% had formal AI governance frameworks, while 63% complied with SDAIA’s national AI principles. Nearly half reported operational efficiency gains of more than 10%.

Saudi Arabia also ranked first globally in women’s empowerment in AI, AI security, privacy and encryption, and digital readiness. It placed third in student adoption of generative AI, sixth in government AI strategy and seventh in financial sector funding.