Saudi Arabia's Ezditek has broken ground on a 24MW data center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The company has also formed a joint venture (JV) with Gcore to develop artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the Kingdom.

Ezditek RUH01 Plan Side
Rendering of the upcoming RUH01 data center – Ezditek

The data center will be Ezditek's flagship facility and called RUH01. It will be located at the female-only university Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University on a 35,000 sqm (376,735 sq ft) plot of land.

RUH01 is expected to go live by Q1 2026, and will have a maximum capacity of 24MW.

“As one of the most vastly developing and transforming cities in the world, Riyadh provides a natural hub for digital transformation. It is the heart of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's (KSA) rapidly expanding technology sector, and this makes it the perfect location for our flagship data center,” said Ibrahim Almulhim, CEO at Ezditek. “We’re matching experience with delivery across the kingdom. Breaking ground on RUH01 marks a critical milestone in our mission to make it simple and efficient for organizations to grow their local presence in the KSA.”

The facility will be able to reach 90 percent of the Saudi population within 25 milliseconds and will host the Saudi Arabian Internet Exchange (SAIE), with speeds of 100Gbps+.

The ground-breaking of this facility follows Ezditek's announced JV with Gcore which will see the two companies develop an "AI factory" in Saudi Arabia for the building, training, and deploying of generative AI solutions.

The two companies signed an agreement in May 2024, and will bring Gcore's expertise in cloud-based AI infrastructure with Ezditek's data center designs and building.

The AI factory will be deployed in an Ezditek data center - it was not specified if it would be the RUH01 facility - and will feature "tens of thousands of GPUs."

“We are excited to join forces with Ezditek in building this groundbreaking AI factory. By combining our cloud services and AI infrastructure capabilities with Ezditek’s expertise in data center development, we are setting a new standard for AI infrastructure in the region,” said Andre Reitenbach, CEO at Gcore.

Almulhim added: “Over the last six months, we have worked in collaboration with Gcore to identify areas where we can deliver the most value for customers, and support the KSA’s vision for AI leadership. Together, we are developing an AI factory purpose-built for enabling and accelerating AI innovation and adoption.

“We’re extremely proud to be working with a global leader in AI enablement and bringing a visionary approach to AI innovation to market in the KSA.”

Gcore is a Luxemburg-headquartered Edge AI cloud provider. In July of this year, the company raised $60m in a Series A funding round. In October 2024, Gcore announced it had signed on as a customer at Telia's data center in Helsinki and would be deploying a GPU cluster with more than 1MW of compute capacity at the facility. In total, the company has 180 points of presence worldwide.

Ezditek has previously announced a partnership with Neom for the development of data centers in the Saudi Arabian city of Neom. Those data centers would be operated by ZeroPoint DC.