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.
Ghufran Hamid, CEO of XDS, stated: “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.” 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 that are still investing in just air-cooled will become the Blockbuster of the data centre market.
Abdullah Ayed Al Mazny, General Manager at Desert Dragon (ICS Arabia), added: “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.”
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.
