Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has started production at its new facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, manufacturing servers for the company’s ProLiant Gen11 portfolio.
The production site was first announced in February 2023 and is a partnership between HPE and digital solutions provider Alfanar.
The project supports the goals of the Saudi Vision 2030 initiative – a government program for ‘economic diversification, global engagement, and enhanced quality of life’ – and has received sponsorship, support, and participation from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Ministry of Investment, Saudi Exports Development Authority and the Communications, Space & Technology Commission.
In a statement, HPE and Alfanar said the facility is the first of its kind in the country and employs a majority female workforce who undergo a “rigorous high-tech training scheme with HPE’s global experts.” Included in the Saudi Vision 2030 initiative is a ‘Saudi Made’ program, which means all servers produced at the site will carry a ‘Saudi Tech’ logo.
Those servers include the ProLiant DL360 and DL380 Gen11, which the company says the site will produce thousands of per year.
The ProLiant server lines are next-generation models that have been engineered for hybrid environments and optimized for AI workloads, such as computer vision inference, generative visual AI, and end-to-end natural language processing.
The two companies said they are already exploring further investments to increase the volume of output from the facility, including new production lines dedicated to servers optimized for telecoms and Cloud Service Providers.
“The opening of our production facility in Riyadh is a significant milestone for HPE and demonstrates our strong commitment to the Saudi Arabian market and the Saudi Made program,” said Mohammad Alrehaili, Middle East managing director at HPE.
“With this long-term investment, we look forward to supporting the country’s ambitious growth agenda and deploying next-generation technologies at the heart of some of the world’s largest development projects. We are proud to build on our deep-rooted commitment to Saudi Arabia by bringing enterprise IT production to the country for the first time, creating highly skilled jobs for Saudi nationals, and accelerating the development of the local tech ecosystem,” he said.
