Magna AI’s CEO on control, security, and next phase of enterprise intelligence

What does AI sovereignty mean for governments and businesses today?

AI sovereignty is now a national and economic imperative. As governments and enterprises accelerate AI adoption, they must ensure that the intelligence powering their operations remains secure, compliant, and fully under their control.

Sovereign AI means having the ability to determine where data is stored, how models are built, how systems are governed, and who has access across every layer of the AI lifecycle. It ensures that critical workloads, from healthcare and finance to national infrastructure, operate within the country’s regulatory, security, and ethical frameworks.

Magna AI was purpose-built for this environment. It accelerates adoption by delivering a fully integrated ecosystem that unifies advisory services, infrastructure, system integration, lifecycle management, and production-ready custom AI applications and automations.

Each layer is reinforced by deep expertise in cybersecurity, compliance, and sovereign-ready design to meet local data residency and regulatory requirements, enabling organisations to deploy AI with confidence, control, and measurable impact.

This end-to-end approach removes the fragmentation and complexity that often delays AI adoption, allowing governments and enterprises to scale more quickly, securely, and in full compliance with national frameworks, ultimately enabling a future-ready AI ecosystem.

Which industries are seeing the biggest benefits from AI adoption?

Several industries are witnessing meaningful benefits from enterprise-scale AI, particularly those aligned with national transformation priorities.

Government and public sector programmes are adopting AI for policy modeling, citizen service platformss, infrastructure monitoring, and digital twins that support city planning and national systems.

In the energy sector, AI enables predictive maintenance, emissions tracking, grid optimization, and risk forecasting, all essential to advancing sustainability and diversification goals.

Financial services are leveraging AI for fraud prevention, AML compliance, AI copilots, and enhanced customer intelligence that support advisory and relationship-management teams.

In healthcare, AI is improving diagnostics, hospital operations, clinical risk scoring, and data-driven public health initiatives.

Smart cities and construction benefit from AI-driven traffic optimization, environmental monitoring, safety management, and integrated command systems.

Across all these industries, organisations are seeking outcomes that deliver measurable ROI while ensuring full security and compliance. Magna AI provides flexibility, domain-specific tooling, and sovereign-ready architecture required to support these sectors at scale, enabling rapid transformation without compromising on control.

How can businesses ensure data security and compliance when scaling AI globally?

Scaling AI globally introduces new layers of complexity around security, governance, and compliance. Traditional cybersecurity models are not enough to defend against AI-specific risks such as model manipulation, training-data poisoning, unauthorized inference access, and supply-chain vulnerabilities.

The only viable path forward is an integrated, AI-native security architecture that protects data, models, pipelines, APIs, and runtime environments as a unified system.

This is where Magna AI differentiates itself. Our platform embeds Trend Micro’s AI-secured architecture across the entire stack, combining infrastructure, applications, orchestration, and built-in security. By unifying these components under one system, Magna AI removes the technical and operational silos that typically delay or derail AI programmes. Enterprises no longer need to assemble AI stacks from multiple providers or worry about gaps in compliance, governance, or scalability. Real-time monitoring, automated policy enforcement, and governance controls ensure consistent protection across infrastructure, data pipelines, model orchestration, and user interfaces.

We also provide organisations with full control over data residency and processing. Our platform supports public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise deployment models, enabling customers to choose the architecture that aligns with regulatory requirements and risk profiles. In addition, our governance tools help organisations monitor compliance, maintain auditability, and build trust across the entire AI lifecycle. This includes GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) capabilities, digital twins for security simulation, and frameworks for responsible AI operation. This unified approach allows businesses to innovate at scale while maintaining trust, resilience, and regulatory compliance across borders.

What does the AI sector’s growth outlook look like for 2026?

By 2026, AI will shift from a strategic priority to a core operational engine across industries, with enterprise adoption accelerating rapidly as organizations move from experimentation to fully industrialized AI systems. The economic opportunity is significant with PwC estimating AI could contribute up to US$320 billion to the Middle East economy by 2030, where Saudi Arabia will capture the largest share of regional gains. AI’s contribution across the region is expected to grow 20–34 per cent annually, driven by increased productivity, advanced automation, and intelligent decision-making.

We expect three major forces to shape the AI landscape in 2026. Industrial AI will become mainstream in mission-critical operations and drive measurable improvements in productivity, cost efficiency, and decision-making. At the same time, AI security will rise to a board-level priority as threats shift from infrastructure to data, models, and AI supply chains, pushing organizations to adopt integrated, AI-native security frameworks. Finally, sovereign AI ecosystems will expand rapidly as governments invest in national AI factories, regulatory frameworks, and sovereign cloud infrastructure to ensure strategic autonomy, compliance, and long-term resilience.

Together, these shifts will define how enterprises and governments move from experimentation to fully industrialized, secure, and scalable AI systems.

Magna AI is fully aligned with this trajectory. Our Full-Value-Chain Transformation Factory model is built to meet these emerging demands, enabling secure, scalable, and sovereign AI ecosystems that deliver measurable impact. The next 18–24 months will be pivotal as enterprises adopt integrated platforms that unify infrastructure, intelligence, automation, and governance under one trusted architecture.

What key partnerships are Magna AI building in the Middle East?

The Middle East is rapidly becoming a global center for AI transformation, and partnerships are central to our strategy in the region.

We are collaborating with government entities, enterprise groups, and technology leaders to co-create AI ecosystems that are secure, scalable, and aligned with regional priorities. This includes partnerships focused on sovereign AI deployment, AI-native cybersecurity, advisory services, digital twin technologies, and sector-specific transformation across finance, energy, healthcare, and national infrastructure.

Our global operations Hub in Saudi Arabia strengthens our regional execution capabilities and enables us to work closely with ministries, regulators, and enterprise leaders. Through strategic collaborations, we accelerate technology transfer, workforce upskilling, and talent development. Our approach includes co-developing AI roadmaps, establishing Centers of Excellence, and nurturing local expertise to ensure long-term capability building.

A key example is our recent partnership with Technoval, designed to help enterprises and governments across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond to become more efficient, secure, and sustainable. This collaboration combines Magna AI’s global expertise in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cybersecurity with Technoval’s deep regional expertise in enterprise systems, ERP, and managed services. The partnership is expected to include the development of a joint AI and Cloud Data Center in Saudi Arabia and across the broader MENA region – a sovereign-ready innovation hub that will support both public and private sector workloads, while offering trusted infrastructure for cross-border AI computing, data governance, and enterprise-grade performance.

By combining global expertise with Saudi-driven innovation, we enable real-world AI impact, helping the Middle East, and particularly the kingdom to lead the next wave of responsible, secure AI transformation.

What major milestones can we expect from Magna AI in the next 12–24 months?

Over the next 12–24 months, Magna AI will focus on scaling its global footprint and delivering enterprise and government programs that generate measurable, large-scale economic impact. Key milestones include expanding our sovereign-ready AI factories across priority regions to deliver national-scale intelligence, automation, and security; deploying industry-specific AI platforms for finance, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and government; and strengthening our presence through our Global Operations Hub in Saudi Arabia, supported by additional expansions to enable close-to-market execution. We will also continue integrating advanced technologies such as NVIDIA’s NIM microservices and Trend Micro’s AI-secured framework to enhance performance, resilience, and security across the platform.

Magna AI is targeting more than $10bn in cumulative economic impact across government and enterprise programmes, driven by productivity gains, operational efficiencies, and accelerated innovation enabled by our unified AI ecosystems. These ecosystems are engineered to deliver 30–50 per cent reductions in transformation costs, two-three times faster time-to-value, and measurable improvements in security, resilience, and sustainability.

Our ambition is clear – to become the default global enterprise AI Transformation Factory, the trusted partner for governments, industries, and enterprises seeking to industrialise intelligence responsibly, securely, and at scale. By enabling sovereign, scalable, and future-ready AI ecosystems, we aim to redefine the return on intelligence and set a new global benchmark for secure and impactful AI transformation that drives long-term economic and societal value.