Speakers:
- Ivan Skenderoski, managing partner, CEO and founder, Salience Consulting (Chairperson)
- Matthew Rix, director of sales – DataVolt
- Shelly Landsman, advisory board chairman – NED
- Menno Parsons, CEO – Master Power Technologies
- Domagoj Talapko, market development manager – ABB
- Priyanka Nagpal, director – data centre capital markets – JLL
The data centre market in the Middle East has undergone a transformation. In the past few years the UAE’s live capacity has more than doubled, jumping from 170 megawatts to over 370 megawatts.
At a recent industry panel discussion at Datacloud Middle East 2026, industry experts from across the data centre and energy sectors gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing MENA’s AI infrastructure buildout.
“When you’re prompting ChatGPT, or when you’re prompting an AI model, the data centre is using an enormous amount of electricity- as much as a small city,” explained Priyanka Nagpal, director of data centre capital markets at JLL. “That’s the amount of electricity needed.”
The scale of projects now coming online reflects this new reality. Matthew Rix, director of sales at DataVolt, used the NEOM development in Saudi Arabia as an example,: “We are going to bring online 1.5 gigawatts of power in the western region, which is one of the bigger projects on the planet at this point.”
Power procurement for hyperscalers
The most significant shift occurring across MENA involves how data centre operators secure long-term power commitments.
Traditional utility contracts, which can take three to seven years to negotiate and close, are fundamentally misaligned with hyperscaler deployment timelines of 12 to 18 months.
Government intervention has proved crucial in bridging this gap.
Nagpal stated: “There are negotiations or agreements where you’re not paying for the electricity you use, but you’re paying for reserving the power that you may use in the future. With this comes government assurance that you will get the power in the future.”
This capacity reservation approach provides the certainty that both data centre operators and their hyperscale customers require.
“The tech companies are committing to a larger timeline for this power- a larger commitment,” Nagpal continued. “Your power companies are getting a long-term customer, and your investors are getting a steady and stable return.”
Yet, reliance on grid power alone won’t solve the capacity challenge, Shelly Landsman, advisory board chairman at NED explained: “We have a commitment from the grid, and we’re happy for that. But we don’t rely just on grid power. We are actually partnering- we have a strong partnership that we’ve built with gas providers to allow us to grow the power going forward.”
Having the renewable energy advantage
MENA’s solar and wind resources are emerging as a competitive differentiator, particularly as sustainability commitments become non-negotiable for hyperscalers.
“Our carbon-neutral solution is going to be three gigawatts of solar, one gigawatt of wind, and all that’s backed up by batteries-you’ll have over seven gigawatts of battery backup,” Rix explained.
“That will allow the facility to run for 48 hours continuously, which is exciting.”
Beyond pure capacity, the project’s modular design anticipates rapid technological evolution. “We’re building modular units, so we’re going to be future-ready for the next phases of the project,” Rix stated. “The first phase is 2028, but if we get to those huge Nvidia solutions, we’ll be able to accommodate that as well.”
This forward-looking infrastructure planning extends to the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, which Nagpal described as “redefining the different tiers of catchments” for data centre locations.
“The government is promoting MDR, where they are looking at players that will have 100% green data centres moving towards a sustainable model,” she continued.
Technical innovation
Whilst procurement models and renewable integration dominate strategic discussions, fundamental shifts in power distribution architecture are quietly revolutionising data centre design.
The catalyst? Nvidia’s latest GPU developments and their unprecedented power density requirements.
Menno Parsons, CEO of Master Power Technologies added, “One exciting thing that I’m starting to see now with the new development of Rubin- the new chip that’s coming out- they’re pushing a lot of 800-volt DC technologies.”
“Nvidia’s DC-per-rack concept potentially can change the whole view of how distribution comes into data centres,” Parsons explained.
“Then you’re talking about SMR technology or solar or wind, and you can basically bring those things in as decentralised sources. If you bring them to DC, there are so many advantages- you don’t have transformers and electronics.”
The shift to DC distribution is enabled partly by crossover innovation from the solar industry.
“A lot of the technology and the switching and the safety devices came from solar parks,” Parsons noted. “Having new tech in terms of protection devices has been driven by economies of scale in solar, which provides protection classes for DC at higher voltage.”
Domagoj Talapko, market development manager at ABB, stressed that meeting gigawatt-scale demands requires rethinking voltage levels entirely.
“Today you are listening to us talking about direct connection to the transmission network, so we are talking about hundreds of kilovolts,” he said. “This definitely requires that you need a direct connection, and it also brings an additional layer of operational responsibility.”
Yet, this complexity also creates opportunity. “Because of the ownership, you can maybe also consider the implementation of onsite generation in non-standard paradigms.”
Talapko explained: “Perhaps you can use gas turbine systems, modular reactors as a primary power source- something that is very much viable because you take control.”
Enhancing skillsets
Infrastructure and financing frameworks will ultimately prove insufficient without the skilled workforce to design, build and operate next-generation facilities.
The challenge is global, but particularly acute in a region historically focused on oil and gas, telecommunications and real estate.
“There’s definitely a lack of a professional workforce that is capable of designing all the way to implementation and then operation,” Talapko acknowledged. “It actually goes back to the data centre owners and also to the OEMs to provide equipment- they should also help build small educational facilities for a new-age workforce.”
“Can you imagine coming to get a thousand people? You need people to be qualified and trained properly. It’s our own responsibility to build our industry as well,” he stressed.
As the Middle East positions itself as a critical hub for AI infrastructure- capitalising on geographic proximity to two-thirds of the world’s population within a five-hour flight radius- the region’s energy strategy must balance ambitious scale with practical agility.
“I think the word is agility,” Landsman observed. “It’s all about being agile in the way you think, the way you operate.
“You can’t really forecast what will happen going forward in terms of availability of power, managing the power, and the needs of the workload,” he concluded.
