The data centre by XDS Datacentres is currently being constructed, with the columns and the roof underway. XDS will operate the first GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) with immersive compute in the region, with Desert Dragon Data Centers – an ICS Arabia subsidiary – designing and constructing the facility.

All parts of the construction are currently on target, XDS said in late 2025, before Desert Dragon hands the project over to XDS by June 2026.

“The one-megawatt halls validate our thermal design, power trains and operations under live loads, so clients can deploy today and scale on the same architecture into multi-megawatt footprints with consistent SLAs, sustainability metrics and network fabrics,” said XDS founder and CEO, Ghufran Hamid, via a LinkedIn post.

“Our next 1MW facility will be in Dubai and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

Data centres in progress: Riyadh and Jeddah developments

This data centre is part of a larger project. In July 2025, XDS signed a significant agreement with ICS Arabia, a Saudi Arabian data centre operator, to construct and deliver initial 10MW immersion-cooled data centres in both Riyadh and Jeddah.

Both companies said that strategic collaboration, developed with ICS Arabia’s Desert Dragon technology ecosystem, would bring advanced computing capacity, sustainability and scalability to support digital transformation across Saudi Arabia.

Both facilities in Riyadh and Jeddah will feature full immersion cooling with rack densities up to 368 kilowatts (kW), making it ideal for services like AI, GPUaaS, cloud-native compute and hyperscale edge deployments.

XDS said the facility design also includes redundant N+N power and cooling systems and high-capacity network interconnectivity, in addition to aiming for a Tier III data centre certification.

Both companies said clients in Saudi Arabia will have a broad range of benefits from the facility, including 99.982% uptime guarantees, fully managed colocation services and smart hands, flexible power allocations, GPUaaS, private cloud, server conversion, customer rack migration and engineering support, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Ultimately, the new data centre will aim to support national cloud initiatives, AI growth and enterprise workloads that need compute infrastructure that is scalable and low latency.

A Saudi Arabian milestone

XDS’ project will utilise Desert Dragon’s Tier III certified infrastructure and immersion-cooling technology to support high-density workloads such as AI, machine learning, blockchain and other GPU-intensive applications.

The announcement comes amid Saudi Arabia aiming to achieve its Saudi Vision 2030 objectives, as the kingdom continues on its mission to be a global leader in AI and other advanced technologies.

Hamid said: “The kingdom represents a key growth market for XDS and this initial 10MW facility will showcase the potential of immersion-cooled infrastructure to deliver both performance and sustainability.”

Expanding into Saudi Arabia in this way was a significant step for XDS, given that it had successfully announced an immersion-cooled data centre in Dubai around the same time. Taking place last year, the one-megawatt colocation facility is in Sharjah Research Technology and Innovation Park.

Hamid said at the time the company’s strategy is to commission “One-megawatt immersion data halls to meet immediate AI demand”.

Describing itself as a pioneer of liquid immersion digital infrastructure, XDS is focused on transforming the data centre landscape with the use of its immersion cooled systems.

These systems, designed to support next-generation workloads, harness best-in-class technology and access to software stacks that align to AI, machine learning, high performance compute (HPC), augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), rendering and metaverse.

Its immersion cooling is designed to help customers innovate and reduce carbon footprints by improving efficiency.

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