LEAP opened its fifth edition in Riyadh on 31 August 2026 with more than $15 billion in technology investments and strategic commitments announced on day one, reinforcing the event's position as a global launchpad for innovation and reflecting the rapid growth of Saudi Arabia's technology sector since the inaugural edition in 2022, organiser Tahaluf said.
Opening LEAP 5, H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, highlighted that the Kingdom's digital economy has grown by 69 per cent since LEAP's launch, from $118 billion to $199 billion, while women now represent 36 per cent of the technology workforce.
Headline announcements spanned AI infrastructure, cloud computing and autonomous technologies. HUMAIN unveiled HUMAIN M3, a new open-weights Arabic language model trained on more than one trillion Arabic tokens, alongside HUMAIN Voice, a conversational AI platform designed for Saudi, Maghrebi, Egyptian and Levantine Arabic.
"No company delivers something at this scale on its own," said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. "What you are seeing is a country rallied around a mission, with partners across the Kingdom building alongside us."
HUMAIN also announced a strategic partnership with Applied Intuition to deploy physical AI across Saudi Arabia, beginning with autonomous trucking and aiming to establish the world's largest autonomous trucking network, with thousands of autonomous vehicles expected across key logistics corridors by 2030.
Further announcements included a $5 billion joint investment between HUMAIN and AWS in the AWS HUMAIN AI Zone, while Adobe highlighted its contribution to Saudi Arabia's creative economy, which has reached $4 billion over the past 12 months. xAI announced a major Saudi-based data centre deployment beginning at 50MW and scaling to 500MW, and AMD and HUMAIN confirmed the deployment of AMD's largest inference cluster outside the United States.
"Since 2022, LEAP has helped establish Saudi Arabia as one of the world's most dynamic technology markets," said Mike Champion, Co-founder of LEAP and CEO of Tahaluf. "The scale of today's announcements reflects both the maturity of the event and the Kingdom's growing influence in shaping the future of the global technology sector."
LEAP 2026 runs until 3 September.