UAE’s Khazna enters Saudi Arabia with first data centre

Khazna Data Centers, the UAE’s largest data centre operator, has acquired a plot of land to develop its first data centre in Saudi Arabia.

The company acquired a 225,000-square-foot land plot in the coastal city in the Eastern Province to develop a data centre with capacity of up to 200 megawatts (MW), it said in a statement.

The new facility is Khazna’s first data centre in the kingdom and will support high-performance workloads for cloud and AI hyperscale deployments. It will be constructed with a modular architecture and accommodate a range of workloads, including GPU clusters for AI deployments.

Khazna named Mohammed Bin Hassan as its country head for Saudi Arabia, who will oversee the Dammam project and drive expansion in the kingdom.

The company currently manages 30 live data centres with a total capacity of almost 650MW. It is working to deliver more than 1 gigawatt (GW) of additional AI-ready capacity across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Italy and other key markets.

The completion timeline and financials were not given.

In September Khazna obtained a $2.62 billion credit facility to support its regional and international growth plans.

The company signed an agreement with Italian oil giant Eni in July to jointly build a 500-megawatt AI data campus in northern Italy.

UAE technology investment company MGX and US private equity company Silver Lake in March bought a minority stake in Khazna.