LEAP, Saudi Arabia's flagship technology event, opens its fifth edition in Riyadh on 31 August and runs through 3 September at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre in Malham. The event was originally scheduled for April and was moved to late summer by its organisers after conflict involving Iran, the United States and Israel disrupted travel, logistics and large gatherings across the region.
The rescheduled dates put LEAP roughly two weeks away, and place it inside the year the Saudi Council of Ministers designated as the Kingdom's Year of Artificial Intelligence.
Key Highlights
- LEAP 2026 runs 31 August to 3 September at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Centre, Malham.
- The edition was moved from its original April slot because of regional instability affecting travel and logistics.
- Organisers expect more than 200,000 visitors, around 1,800 exhibiting brands, roughly 600 startups, some 1,900 investors and over 1,000 speakers.
- LEAP's first four editions, from 2022 to 2025, produced more than $42.4 billion in announced technology investment.
- LEAP 2025 alone opened with a record $14.9 billion in AI investment commitments.
Details
"LEAP has always been about bringing the world's most ambitious minds together to shape what's next," said Annabelle Mander, executive vice president at Tahaluf and co-creator of the event. "Hosting LEAP 2026 through early September ensures we continue to deliver the global participation and world-class experience that our community expects."
The scale of the previous edition explains why the date change mattered to the regional technology calendar. LEAP 2025, held 9 to 12 February 2025, drew more than 200,000 attendees from over 180 countries across 1,500 exhibitors, more than 1,000 speakers on 15 stages and a showcase of 680 startups. Organisers announced $14.9 billion in new AI investment on the opening day alone, taking cumulative technology infrastructure commitments made at the event past $42.4 billion since its 2022 debut.
Individual deals from that edition included a $1.5 billion partnership between Groq and Aramco Digital, and a $2 billion investment involving Alat and Lenovo.
Impact
For businesses across the Gulf, LEAP has become less a trade show than a scheduling anchor. Vendor announcements, sovereign infrastructure commitments and public-sector procurement signals tend to cluster around it, and a four-month shift moves that cluster into the same quarter as the Kingdom's autumn events season.
The timing also lands in a year when the Saudi state has made artificial intelligence an explicit cross-government priority. The Communications, Space and Technology Commission published an awareness guide for AI adoption in technology companies in early August, and NVIDIA executives have spent the summer describing Saudi data centres as shifting toward what the company calls AI factories, infrastructure built to generate model output at scale rather than simply store and serve information. Saudi data centre investment has exceeded SR16 billion, about $4.26 billion, since 2016.
What that means practically for companies operating in the Kingdom is that the gap between announcement and operation is now where the work sits. Committed capital and published guidance do not by themselves connect a model to a billing system, a workforce platform or a compliance boundary.
Background
LEAP launched in 2022 and grew quickly into one of the largest technology events by attendance anywhere. It is produced by Tahaluf, a joint venture involving Informa, and has served as the venue for a series of large Saudi technology and AI infrastructure announcements over four editions.
The 2026 edition is the first to be held outside its usual first-quarter window. Related coverage: the Global AI Summit planned for Riyadh, the CST guide on AI adoption for technology companies, and the Gulf's lead in moving agentic AI into production.
What's Next
Expect the usual pattern: opening-day investment figures, sovereign compute and data centre announcements, and a startup track that has historically been where regional acquisitions surface first. Whether the totals hold up against the $14.9 billion opening of 2025 will be the headline number to watch on 31 August.
For teams planning to act on what gets announced, the harder question is integration. Moving an AI pilot into production in Saudi Arabia means wiring it to platforms that already exist, and keeping personal data inside a defensible boundary while doing it, a constraint we covered in detail in why your AI stack is a cross-border transfer under the PDPL.
If you are heading to Riyadh with a project you want scoped rather than pitched, talk to us and we will map the integration and compliance path before you commit budget.
Source: Arab News