Notes from building hardware in Riyadh
The question we get most often from outside the region is why we build here. The answer is less sentimental than people expect.
Ammar Enaya Co-founder and CEO 2 min read
It comes up in almost every first meeting with someone outside the region. Usually politely, sometimes not. Why build compute hardware in Riyadh.
The honest answer has nothing to do with flags. It has to do with three things that are easier here than they are in most places.
Power is available and it is being planned for
Anyone who has tried to add a few megawatts to an existing site in a mature market knows how that conversation goes. Here the build-out is happening now, which means the constraint is not whether power exists but what you do with it once you have it. That is a much better problem, and it is the one we are actually good at.
The appetite for new infrastructure is real
A lot of the compute being bought in this region is being bought for the first time. There is no decade of accumulated assumptions about how a rack has to look, or which vendor owns which layer. When you turn up with a sealed node that does not need a room built around it, people ask how it works rather than which existing thing it replaces.
Nobody here is defending a design decision made in 2014.
The engineers are younger and less specialised
This one surprises people. The talent pool in the Gulf skews early career, and early career engineers have not yet been sorted into a lane. We need people who will follow a problem from the thermal envelope into the driver and out the other side into the scheduler. That is easier to find in someone who has not spent eight years being told that the layer below them is not their department.
None of this makes the work easier. Supply chains are longer, and there is no local ecosystem of people who have built this exact thing before, so a lot of what we do is being done for the first time by the people doing it. That is a real cost and we pay it every week.
But the reason to build here is not that it is convenient. It is that the region is about to run a great deal of silicon, and somebody should be making sure it is not mostly idle.