Today's Bulletin: January 17, 2026

More results...

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
Filter by Categories
Africacom
AfricaCom 2024
AfricaCom 2025
AI
Apps
Apps
Arabsat
Banking
Broadcast
Cabsat
CABSAT
Cloud
Column
Content
Corona
Cryptocurrency
DTT
eCommerce
Editorial
Education
Entertainment
Events
Fintech
Fixed
Gitex
Gitex Africa
Gitex Africa 2025
GSMA Cape Town
Healthcare
IBC
Industry Voices
Infrastructure
IoT
MNVO Nation Africa
Mobile
Mobile Payments
Music
MWC Barcelona
MWC Barcelona 2025
MWC Kigali
MWC Kigali 2025
News
Online
Opinion Piece
Orbiting Innovations
Podcast
Q&A
Satellite
Security
Software
Startups
Streaming
Technology
TechTalks
TechTalkThursday
Telecoms
Utilities
Video Interview
Follow us

XDS and ICS Arabia Sign Deal to Develop 10MW Data Centre in Riyadh and Jeddah

July 9, 2025
3 min read
Author: Editorial Team

This strategic collaboration, developed within ICS Arabia’s Desert Dragon technology ecosystem, will bring advanced computing capacity, sustainability, and scalability to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation.

UK & Dubai based data center company XDS DATACENTRES (“XDS ”), a pioneer of Liquid Immersion digital infrastructure, has signed a major agreement with ICS Arabia  to deliver an initial state of the art 10-megawatt immersion cooled data centre in Riyadh & Jeddah. This strategic collaboration, developed within ICS Arabia’s Desert Dragon technology ecosystem, will bring advanced computing capacity, sustainability, and scalability to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation.

Under the terms of the agreement, ICS Arabia will design, construct, and hand over the facility to XDS by June 2026. The project will utilize 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 facility will set a new benchmark for energy-efficient, high-performance computing in the region.

“We are pleased to partner with ICS Arabia on this landmark deployment. 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.”

Ghufran Hamid, CEO, XDS.

XDS would like to contribute to vision 2030 supplying sustainable infrastructure meeting global ESG standards. With our roots originating from the United Kingdom, the UAE and KSA are natural growth markets for XDS. No other data center company is providing the services XDS will provide. We are pioneering the inevitable switch from air cooled to liquid immersion. Those companies who are still investing in just air cooled will become the Blockbuster of the data centre market.

“Our partnership with XDS reflects our shared vision to deliver cutting-edge data center capabilities in the Kingdom. Together, we are enabling sovereign digital infrastructure aligned with the ambitions of Saudi Vision 2030.”

Abdullah Ayed Al Mazny, General Manager, Desert Dragon (ICS Arabia).

 

Immersion Cooling at Scale

Both Riyadh & Jeddah facilities will feature full immersion cooling with rack densities up to 368 kilowatts. This makes it ideal for services such as AI, GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), cloud-native compute, and hyperscale edge deployments. The design includes:

  • Redundant N+N power and cooling systems
  • Tier III certification (TCCF and TCDD)
  • High-capacity network interconnectivity

 

Enterprise-Grade Service and SLAs

Clients of XDS in Saudi Arabia will benefit from:

  • 99.982 percent uptime guarantees
  • Fully managed colocation services and smart hands
  • Flexible power allocations
  • GPU as a Service, Private Cloud, Server conversion
  • Customer rack migration and engineering support
  • Infrastructure as a Service & Software as a Service

 

Supporting Saudi Arabia’s Digital Future

This project represents a significant milestone for both XDS and ICS Arabia as they contribute to building the Kingdom’s digital infrastructure and sovereign data capabilities. The XDS data center will support national cloud initiatives, artificial intelligence growth, and enterprise workloads that require scalable, low-latency compute infrastructure.

Following the successful announcement of XDS’s immersion cooled facility in Dubai, this expansion into the kingdom further positions the company as a leading operator deploying immersion cooling at scale for high density compute across the GCC.

The TechAfrica News Podcast

Follow us on LinkedIn

Newsletter signup

Sign up for our weekly newsletter and get the latest industry insights right in your inbox!

Please wait...

Thank you for sign up!