UK & Dubai-based XDS Datacentres (XDS), a developer of liquid immersion digital infrastructure, has signed a major agreement with ICS Arabia for the construction and delivery of Riyadh & Jeddah’s first 10 MW immersion-cooled data centre.
This collaboration, developed within ICS Arabia’s Desert Dragon technology ecosystem, aims to bring advanced computing capacity, sustainability, and scalability to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation.
Under the terms of the 15-year agreement, ICS Arabia will design, construct, and hand over two 10MW facilities to XDS by Q4 2026. The 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, while the facility will seek to set new benchmarks for energy-efficient, high-performance computing in the region.
The signing ceremony was held on 8 July at Desert Dragon’s headquarters in Riyadh, with key executives from both organisations in attendance.
Ghufran Hamid, CEO of XDS, states, “We are pleased to partner with ICS Arabia on this landmark deployment. The Kingdom represents a key growth market for XDS, and the initial 10MW facilities will showcase the potential of immersion-cooled infrastructure to deliver both performance and sustainability. XDS would like to contribute to Vision 2030 by supplying sustainable infrastructure meeting global ESG standards.
“This isn’t just another facility, it’s the beginning of a new era. No other data centre company is providing the services XDS will provide, with the switch from air-cooled to liquid immersion. As demand for high-density AI workloads, sovereign compute, and climate-resilient digital infrastructure continues to rise, traditional air-cooled data centres are already struggling to cope. Immersion cooling isn’t a niche but an inevitability.”
Abdullah Ayed Al Mazny, General Manager at Desert Dragon (ICS Arabia), adds, “Our partnership with XDS reflects our shared vision to deliver cutting-edge data centre capabilities in the Kingdom. Together, we are enabling sovereign digital infrastructure aligned with the ambitions of Saudi Vision 2030.”
Both Riyadh & Jeddah facilities will feature full immersion cooling with rack densities up to 368kW. This would make them appropriate for services such as AI, GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), cloud-native compute, and hyperscale edge deployment. The design includes redundant N+N power and cooling systems, Tier III certification (TCCF and TCDD), and high-capacity network interconnectivity.
Clients of XDS in Saudi Arabia will, according to the company, “benefit from 99.982% 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.”
The project represents a milestone for both XDS and ICS Arabia as they contribute to building the Kingdom’s digital infrastructure and sovereign data capabilities.
The XDS data centre will support national cloud initiatives, artificial intelligence growth, and enterprise workloads that require scalable, low-latency compute infrastructure.
Following the announcement of XDS’s successful immersion cooled facility in Dubai, this expansion into the Kingdom seeks to position the company as a key operator deploying immersion cooling at scale for high-density compute across the GCC.
