HUMAIN, a PIF company delivering full-stack artificial intelligence capabilities globally, and DataVolt, a Saudi-based developer and operator of sustainable digital infrastructure, have announced that ground has been broken on an AI-ready data centre at Oxagon, the industrial city on the Red Sea coast in NEOM.
The ground-breaking marks the start of construction on the 360 MW first phase of Datavolt’s wider planned 1.5 GW Oxagon campus. In February 2025, the company signed a $5-billion agreement with NEOM to build a net-zero AI data centre campus at Oxagon. The project now moves from planning into execution, delivering high-density digital infrastructure designed to support the rapidly growing compute requirements of advanced artificial intelligence.
Oxagon’s strategic position on the Red Sea coast enhances the project’s global connectivity credentials, with access to subsea fibre-optic cables ensuring low-latency international data transmission. Proximity to renewable energy and green hydrogen projects adds to the appeal as a global AI infrastructure hub.
The facility is expected to integrate renewable energy sources, innovative cooling technologies, and high-performance computing clusters to support large-scale AI and cloud workloads, with the first 100 MW anticipated to be available in 2028.
The ground-breaking marks the start of construction on the 360 MW first phase of Datavolt’s wider planned 1.5 GW Oxagon campus.
The project brings together HUMAIN’s capabilities across the AI stack with DataVolt’s expertise in developing, financing, delivering and operating large-scale digital infrastructure. Designed for the demands of next-generation accelerated computing, the facility will provide the physical infrastructure required to deploy AI compute at significant scale.
“AI ambition only matters when you can turn it into infrastructure, compute and capacity that customers can use,” says Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “That is what this partnership with DataVolt is about. Construction is under way, 100 MW is moving forward, and we are building with the speed and scale that the next era of AI demands.”
The development builds on DataVolt’s broader infrastructure pipeline across Saudi Arabia and Central Asia and its experience in structuring and delivering capital-intensive digital infrastructure projects.
“AI infrastructure at this scale demands more than capital and capacity, but disciplined execution, from power and engineering through construction and operations,” says Rajit Nanda, CEO of DataVolt. “Our partnership with HUMAIN brings together our complementary capabilities with a clear focus on delivery and bringing world-class digital infrastructure capacity to the kingdom. Breaking ground at Oxagon is an important milestone as we move forward with the first 360 MW phase and build the infrastructure required to support AI compute at scale.”
The companies expect the project to benefit from Oxagon’s industrial infrastructure – including pre-zoned industrial land availability, at-scale energy resources and access to low-latency compute through subsea cable connectivity to Europe and Africa – all designed to support large-scale industrial and technology developments. These characteristics are particularly important for AI infrastructure, where access to power, speed of development, connectivity and operating efficiency are becoming increasingly critical to the economics of compute.
“Breaking ground on the HUMAIN and DataVolt project is an important demonstration of the industrial ecosystem taking shape at Oxagon,” says Eng Aiman Al-Mudaifer, Managing Director and Chief Executive Office of NEOM. “The ability to secure the power, land and connectivity needed to grow is becoming critical to the economics of AI. As progress on the first phase of DataVolt’s AI campus accelerates, Oxagon is bringing these advantages together to create a strong proposition for companies building the infrastructure required for the next generation of AI.”
The project comes as global demand for AI infrastructure continues to accelerate, increasing requirements for power, high-density data centre capacity and the infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly powerful computing systems. The HUMAIN-DataVolt partnership is designed to address that demand.