At LEAP, AWS announced its largest regional investment yet. Madhavi Reddy, Managing Director Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, explains the infrastructure mesh behind it — and why 45% of enterprises say talent, not technology, is what’s stopping them.
AWS has been in the Middle East since 2019, when it opened its first regional infrastructure in Bahrain, followed by Dubai in 2022. In December 2026 it goes live in Riyadh — three full-fledged regions, supported by local zones in Turkey and Oman, seven Direct Connect locations, eight CloudFront locations and a wavelength zone in Morocco.
Madhavi Reddy, Managing Director for AWS Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, calls it an infrastructure mesh, and the design is deliberate. “It is an infrastructure mesh, primarily because the sovereignty guardrails in these countries are so different that you want to be able to custom-build solutions,” she says.
Sovereignty, in her framing, is not one thing. “First, the definition differs in different countries,” she notes. Saudi Arabia requires in-country data residency, zero-trust security and control over data movement — and meeting that takes more than residency alone. “It is not just data residency. It is also about full-stack availability within the country. It is about the processes, the security guardrails, the frameworks that we put in place.”
At LEAP, AWS announced $10.3 billion for the Kingdom: $5.3 billion for the Riyadh region, launching with three availability zones, 70-plus services and 160 partners, and a further $5 billion for a purpose-built sovereign AI zone with HUMAIN. That partnership runs both ways. ALLaM, a model built in Saudi Arabia, is now available worldwide through Bedrock, and HUMAIN’s Fabric platform has reached a global audience via AWS Marketplace. “We are hoping that we will be able to take Saudi-built IP to the rest of the world with the AWS network,” Reddy says.
But her sharper point is about people. An IDC study found 98% of enterprises in KSA and the UAE see AI as transformational, yet 45% named the skills gap as the single biggest obstacle. “That is the biggest blocker to democratization,” she says. AWS has reached 682,000 people across the region with cloud skills and is targeting two million by 2030 — including 10,000 Saudi women, and mentoring circles for Emirati women through Qudwatech.
On what she’d tell women weighing a career in AI, Reddy is direct: “AI is a great leveller.”
