The infrastructure of growth

Mobily’s 2025 sustainability report describes something uncommon in telecommunications: a network that grew sharply larger over the past two years while the emissions produced by running it fell. The company added more than 3,600 5G sites in 2025 alone, expanded its subscriber base by double digits, and moved more data than at any point in its history. Over the same stretch, Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, the categories a company controls most directly, moved the other way.

Read closely, the report tells two stories. The first is of a company that grew while cutting its operational emissions, an outcome the sector rarely produces. The second is of a company whose next round of reductions depends increasingly on something it does not control: how quickly the Saudi electricity grid gets cleaner. Both sit in the same disclosures, and a fair account of Mobily’s record has to include both.

THREE NUMBERS WORTH UNDERSTANDING FIRST

Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, the standard Mobily uses, a company’s emissions fall into three categories. Scope 1 is what a company burns itself—for a telecom operator, mostly diesel in the generators that keep towers running where the grid is unreliable. Scope 2 is the electricity it buys, and it is the category that matters most for a network operator, since base stations, exchanges, and data centers draw power around the clock. Those emissions are produced at the power plant, not the tower, but accounting rules assign them to whoever bought the electricity—so Scope 2 rises and falls with two things: how much power a company uses and how clean the grid supplying it happens to be. Scope 3 covers the company’s other indirect GHG emissions across it’s value chain from activities not directly owned or controlled by the company. 

Scopes 1 and 2 together are what the industry calls operational emissions, and they are what most targets, Mobily’s included, are set against. The distinction matters here, because it is precisely where the two stories diverge.

GROWING WITHOUT GROWING THE FOOTPRINT

Mobily’s revenue rose from SAR 16.76 billion in 2023 to SAR 19.64 billion in 2025, up 17.2%, according to the company’s earnings releases filed with the Saudi Exchange. Over the same two years, Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fell 17.6%, from 790,093 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent to 651,182, the company reported. Measured against 2022, the baseline for its formal target, the decline reaches 22.2%. Carbon intensity—emissions per unit of revenue—fell about 30% over the same period.

That happened alongside network expansion, not instead of it: against its 2022 baseline, Mobily has cut Scope 1 emissions 25% and Scope 2 emissions 21%, roughly halfway to a 2030 target of a 42% reduction across both. Two years is a short run of data, not proof of a lasting trend, but the direction cuts against what growth usually does to a network operator’s emissions.

Scope 3, the value-chain category, moved the other way—Mobily reported 335,278 tonnes in 2024 and 376,101 in 2025, a rise of about 12%, driven by the equipment and contracted services a network expansion this size requires. The company has only disclosed Scope 3 for two years, so the trend is thin, and a rising figure during heavy capital spending is close to expected. Add all three scopes together, and the total footprint still fell, from around 1.11 million tonnes in 2024 to 1.03 million in 2025, about 7.5%. The decoupling survives the wider measure. It is a more modest story than the operational number alone suggests, and it holds up better for being told that way.

WHAT THE NETWORK HAS BECOME

A telecom operator, by the old definition, sells calls, texts, and data plans. Mobily’s disclosures describe something closer to national utility infrastructure: more than 66,000 kilometers of long-haul, metro, and fiber networks; 7,668 5G sites; and 96% 5G population coverage across the Kingdom’s seven main cities. Wireless broadband has reached 26 governorates, and more than 1,300 rural sites, previously with no coverage, are now connected, extending the network past the urban corridors where building it is easiest.

At that scale, the traffic stops being purely consumer. Businesses in smaller cities reach national markets through it, government services are delivered over it, and previously unconnected communities gain access to services that depend on it. Mobily’s SAR 3.4 billion investment in data centers and submarine cables extends the same logic outward, linking domestic digital capacity to global data flows that matter as much to Saudi Arabia’s regional position as to Mobily’s own network.

THE COST OF RUNNING THE COMPUTERS

Data center efficiency is measured by Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE: the ratio of total energy a facility draws to the energy reaching its computers. A PUE of 2.0 means one watt of overhead for every watt of useful computing; closer to 1.0 is better.

Mobily’s improved from 3.15 in 2023 to 2.48 in 2025, the company reported, a real gain of close to a fifth less overhead for the same computing load, achieved while capacity was being added. It also leaves Mobily above the global average of 1.54 in the Uptime Institute’s 2025 survey, and well above the 1.1 to 1.2 range typical of hyperscale operators. Some of that gap is unavoidable: Gulf temperatures impose a cooling burden no operator can fully design around. 

WHERE THE SCOPE 2 NUMBER ACTUALLY CAME FROM

Here the report rewards a second reading. Mobily’s total electricity consumption rose in 2025, from 237 gigawatt-hours to 252. Its Scope 2 emissions fell 17.7% over the same year.

Both are true at once because of how Scope 2 is calculated. Mobily uses published national grid emission factors, so the figure moves with the carbon intensity of Saudi generation, regardless of what the company itself does, and that intensity shifted substantially in 2025, as grid-connected renewable capacity in the Kingdom reached 12.3 gigawatts by year-end, more than double a year earlier, according to figures published by vision2030.ai. Part of the improvement belongs to Mobily, and part belongs to the grid it plugs into. The company’s own report does not pretend otherwise, identifying purchased electricity as its largest remaining source of operational emissions.

What Mobily can claim without qualification is the engineering. It installed 29,292 LED fixtures against a target of 23,330 and 353 smart-inverter HVAC units against a target of 199, moved 145 sites from generator to grid power, and completed 2G and 3G modernization, cutting consumption by 142 kilowatts. Emissions from generators serving data centers and technical sites fell 41.2%. Individually these are modest against a footprint measured in hundreds of thousands of tonnes—which is itself the clearest illustration of how much the grid matters to the total. Mobily’s own renewable generation remains under 1% of its supply. 

On a separate front, the company has recorded zero data breaches since 2018, even as attempted attacks rose to 35,915 in 2025 from 12,396 the year before. Attacks reaching the network stayed mostly flat, at 987 against 960, with the gap between attempts and breaches widening even as attempts nearly tripled.

WHAT IS LEFT TO DO

Mobily’s 2030 target, a 42% cut in Scope 1 and 2 against 2022, is almost half delivered after three years of an eight-year window. The easier operational gains, lighting, HVAC, shifting sites off diesel, and retiring legacy equipment are largely banked, and the remainder must be achieved while capacity and data demand continue to grow. Much of it now depends on the carbon intensity of the electricity. Mobily buys, a variable outside its direct control, making progress more challenging to sustain even as commitment holds.

Morgan Stanley Capital International, better known by its acronym ‘MSCI’, upgraded the company from A in 2023 to AA in 2024, sustaining the rating through 2025, making Mobily the first telecommunications operator in the Middle East to hold that rating. At the same time, Sustainalytics moved it from high risk to medium risk, according to the 2025 report.

THE RECORD, IN SUM

Thirteen of Mobily’s fifteen public sustainability targets for 2025 were met, four exceeded, and two near targets. The company beat its LED and HVAC installation goals by wide margins, doubled 5G coverage at the holy sites, and sustained zero waste to landfill for a second year, all while keeping its breach record intact.

The fair version of the story is narrower than the headline emissions figure and stronger for being told that way: Mobily cut its operational emissions faster than its revenue grew, while its network expanded significantly, with real help from a national grid that got cleaner underneath it. What happens next depends on two things moving together—efficiency gains inside the company and decarbonization outside it. The first is within Mobily’s control. The second, increasingly, is not.