عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Technology

AWS to Launch First Cloud Infrastructure Region in Saudi Arabia in December

The AI Zone capacity will include AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for customers to run AI training and inference workloads. (SPA)
The AI Zone capacity will include AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for customers to run AI training and inference workloads. (SPA)
TT
TT

AWS to Launch First Cloud Infrastructure Region in Saudi Arabia in December

The AI Zone capacity will include AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for customers to run AI training and inference workloads. (SPA)
The AI Zone capacity will include AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for customers to run AI training and inference workloads. (SPA)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh on Monday that its first AWS Cloud Infrastructure Region in Saudi Arabia is on track to launch in December 2026.

Together with HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund–owned company, AWS will also make up to 50 megawatts (MW) of capacity available in Saudi Arabia’s first AI Zone by 2028 as part of an expanded strategic collaboration.

AWS is HUMAIN’s preferred AI partner, driving AI innovation across the Kingdom and globally. The AI Zone capacity will include AWS’s Trainium chips and the latest NVIDIA AI infrastructure for customers to run AI training and inference workloads.

Increased cloud and AI capacity is key to growing the Kingdom’s AI leadership and supporting public and private sector organizations to build a future-ready economy in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.

HUMAIN’s ALLAM Arabic large language model will soon be available through Amazon Bedrock, so customers can securely access advanced Arabic-language AI capabilities through a fully managed generative AI platform.

The expanded collaboration also includes the availability of HUMAIN Fabric, HUMAIN’s AI-native data infrastructure and a component of the HUMAIN ONE platform, via AWS Marketplace.

With the new region, developers, startups, and enterprises will have greater choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in Saudi Arabia.

All AWS regions are sovereign-by-design, reflecting AWS’s commitment to offering customers advanced sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud.

“Saudi Arabia is home to some of the most ambitious and inventive builders, from startups and enterprises reimagining industries to public sector organizations deploying AI at scale, and the new AWS region in the country will help them to continue to innovate,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman.

“The launch of our new region and our partnership with HUMAIN will deliver the full-stack cloud and AI infrastructure to help power new industries, create jobs, and accelerate the goals of Vision 2030.”

Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha said Saudi Arabia is building the computing power needed for the Intelligence Age and strengthening its position as a global computing partner.

He said: “The launch of AWS’s new region and its expanded partnership with HUMAIN will help accelerate AI innovation, enable new industries, and advance the goals of Saudi Vision 2030.”

The region, first announced in March 2024, represents more than $5.3 billion (SAR19.88 billion) in planned cloud infrastructure investment. This launch will expand the AWS Global Infrastructure to 40 regions worldwide.

According to an IDC report commissioned by AWS, AI will contribute an estimated $130 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by 2030. The new region will help accelerate this potential by empowering organizations to innovate faster and operate more efficiently, while providing access to advanced AI services like Amazon Bedrock.

Saudi organizations including Abdul Latif Jameel, Almosafer, stc group, Red Bull MOBILE, and AWS Partners like ZainTECH, Accenture, and Tamkeen Technologies will be running AI workloads on AWS.

stc group has announced a strategic collaboration with AWS to accelerate the adoption of cloud and AI services in Saudi Arabia, while ZainTECH has signed a multiyear agreement to help organizations adopt AWS solutions and strengthen their security and compliance readiness.

Beyond infrastructure, AWS is making an investment in Saudi Arabia’s workforce development.

The Amazon Academy, launched with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), provides free training in cloud computing, AI, logistics, and retail, aiming to train over 100,000 Saudi citizens for digital careers. AWS has also partnered with 11 higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia, and is training up to 10,000 women through the AWS Saudi Arabia Women's Skills Initiative at no charge.

Across the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye, AWS commits to reaching two million people with AI and cloud training by 2030 and has already served more than 680,000 individuals to date.

Additionally, AWS is establishing two innovation centers in Saudi Arabia to provide technical mentorship and training to startups and entrepreneurs.

Most Viewed

 
 
Technology

China's Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior

FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
TT
TT

China's Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior

FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo

Tencent said on Friday that AI agents used to evaluate third-party models displayed web-browsing behavior not intended by the tech giant, in what appears to be the first known incident of rogue agent actions acknowledged by a major Chinese company.

The statement followed a report by AI-safety research group Swarmchasers on Wednesday, which said "rogue" agents running on infrastructure it linked to Tencent Cloud made repeated attempts between September 28 and October 8 to retrieve information from Alibaba's Amap, China's equivalent to Google Maps.

Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial ⁠intelligence unit, said in ⁠a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, Reuters quoted it as saying.

The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos.

The actions are not as egregious as those disclosed by US AI companies which include the hack of ⁠open-source platform Hugging Face by an OpenAI agent and the lodging of a fake homicide tip by an Anthropic agent.

But the disclosure underscores research that shows Chinese AI agents can also misrepresent their identity, conceal failures and try to circumvent testing controls.

Tencent said it took the findings very seriously and was strengthening network access controls and agent monitoring.

Hunyuan is one of China's leading AI model developers, competing with in-house teams at rivals such as Alibaba and ByteDance. ByteDance this week announced the creation of a new unit focused on AI model and agent safety.

Swarmchasers said it used the ⁠word "rogue" to ⁠describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code.

Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Technology

Anthropic Co-founder Renews Call for Robust Regulation of Frontier AI

AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
TT
TT

Anthropic Co-founder Renews Call for Robust Regulation of Frontier AI

AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark renewed calls on Friday for regulating artificial intelligence, saying that allowing companies to continue to operate without robust legislation was like letting a race car loose on the streets at night without brakes.

"It's remarkable to me that the toys I buy for my children are regulated more than the literal super intelligence I work on at my day job," he told an event at the IMF-World Bank's Annual Meetings in Bangkok.

Clark said that US President Donald Trump, whose administration has called for the industry to police itself, was against the idea of regulation but that China was not, said AFP.

"I think it's Formula One at night without maybe brakes in the cars," he said.

He said the lack of clarity around the will for regulation meant "the Formula One car is roaring round and nobody seems to want to put up a guardrail?"

At an industry summit in Dublin on Wednesday, calls to prioritize safety in the development of powerful AI technology dominated the conversation.

Concerns about AI guardrails have soared after models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic were involved in security incidents during testing, piling on pressure to regulate the technology.

A recent Anthropic report suggested small AI models may be only months away from behaving like computer worms, copying themselves from one internet-connected device to the next.

Anthropic has been among those companies calling for governments to step in, even suggesting international coordination to slow down the whole industry -- including Chinese rivals.

That initiative has so far failed to materialize, with companies involved in a hyper-competitive race to attract as much investment as possible.

Technology

Meta Releases Open-Weight Muse Spark Model for Coding, Agentic Tasks

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
TT
TT

Meta Releases Open-Weight Muse Spark Model for Coding, Agentic Tasks

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)

Meta ‌Platforms on Thursday released an open-weight version of its Muse Spark artificial intelligence model for coding and AI agents, expanding developers' ability to download and adapt the technology.

Open-weight models make trained parameters available for developers to modify, unlike proprietary models ‌that remain under ‌their creators' control. ‌They ⁠can offer businesses ⁠a lower-cost alternative to closed systems.

Meta said Muse Spark has 816 billion total parameters, with 42 billion active at a time, and ⁠can handle a context window ‌of up ‌to 1 million tokens.

The ‌model can run locally on ‌two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studio computers and is also available through some API providers.

CEO ‌Mark Zuckerberg has argued that advanced AI should ⁠not be ⁠concentrated among a small number of companies.

While open-weight models can give companies greater control over their data, they can require significant computing resources and technical expertise to operate at scale.

In August, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a smaller open-weight model.