Groq CEO Jonathan Ross reportedly highlighted Saudi Arabia as a leading destination for AI infrastructure due to its abundant energy resources which are ideal for data centres.

Speaking during a CNBC interview at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference that runs from 27-30 October in Riyadh, Ross stated Saudia Arabia could become a net exporter of data due to its surplus energy.

“One of the things that’s hard to export is energy,” he explained in the interview. “You have to move it, it’s physical, it costs money. Electricity, transporting it over transmission lines is very expensive.”

He said since there’s plenty of excess energy in Saudia Arabia, “the idea is move the data here, put the compute here, do the computation for AI here and send the results.”

 “What we’re doing is we’re building out an enormous data centre here,” Ross stated. “What you don’t want do is build a data centre right next to people where it’s expensive for the land or where the energy’s already being used.

“You want to build it where there aren’t too many people, where the energy is underutilized. And that’s the Middle East, so this is the ideal place to build out.”

In February, Aramco Digital-backed Groq launched the largest AI inferencing platform in the Middle East which included a $1.5 billion investment by Aramco Digital’s parent and Groq itself.

Rivals xAI,  Google, Meta Platforms and Microsoft are also scrambling to invest billions of dollars across the region on compute infrastructure and building large data centre clusters to train their models.