‘We want the kingdom to be one of the largest exporters of compute’: DataVolt CEO Rajit Nanda
Saudi Arabia built an economy on exporting oil. DataVolt CEO Rajit Nanda argues the next export is compute power, and that the kingdom’s real advantage is not energy alone, but where it sits on the map
18 August, 2026
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Rajit Nanda does not describe DataVolt as a data centre company, at least not first. He describes it as an energy company that arrived at data centres from the other direction.
“We come from the world of energy and are gravitating towards the world of data centres,” says the CEO of the Saudi firm, now two and a half years old. “If you look into our name itself, it says it all: Data and Volt. Volt represents the energy part of it, and data represents the intelligence part of it.”
That lineage matters. DataVolt sits within Vision Invest, the Saudi industrial holding group that incubated ACWA Power, the listed water re-use firm Miahona, and Saudi Tabreed, its district cooling joint venture with the UAE’s Tabreed. The group also holds interests in cargo and logistics and in LNG, in partnership with US energy private equity firm EIG and Aramco.
By Nanda’s account, it has built around $120bn of greenfield infrastructure across energy, water and green hydrogen in roughly 15 countries over two decades.
DataVolt was the conclusion the group reached about what comes next.
“We all came together and realised that the future of the world is not just going to be energy and water from an infrastructure perspective, but it’s going to be the nexus of energy, water and intelligence. And what was underpinning intelligence was digital infrastructure.”
The company positions itself across what Nanda calls the AI infrastructure layer of the stack, energy, conventional data centres, and compute infrastructure. “If you add all of them together as one vertical plane, that’s what is essentially the AI infrastructure.”
Sold out before completion
The current build is deliberately modest by the group’s standards: around 60MW, split between Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, with 48MW across two Saudi sites and 12MW in Tashkent. All of it – in phases – is due to be operational by the end of the year.
Nanda calls these “our first initial baby steps” and “market validation sizes”, though he concedes the point when pressed on the roughly $1bn involved. “It’s not small. Let’s put it that way.”
More striking is the take-up. “As we speak, I’m very happy to share with you that all of our facilities are sold out,” he says. “We are just about a few megawatts of spare capacity out of the 60.”
He is also careful to distinguish the commercial model from the rest of the infrastructure world. Airports, independent power producers and desalination plants are, in his framing, business-to-government propositions with a single offtaker, usually a utility or a state concession. Data centres are not.
“Data centre business is slightly different. It is a B2B business, because your customers are enterprises or hyperscalers.”
Around 70 per cent of DataVolt’s Saudi capacity is being used for AI workloads, Nanda says, with the balance for cloud. In Uzbekistan the split is closer to even. The company is among the first operators in Central Asia and the GCC deploying liquid cooling at scale, which enables the high-density racks AI training requires.
Making a new asset class bankable
The development Nanda is keenest to discuss is not a building but a financing. DataVolt recently reached financial close on its Tashkent project with a syndicate of European development finance institutions, including the EBRD, France’s Proparco, Germany’s DEG and the OPEC Fund.
“Single asset project financing has not happened in the world of data centres,” he says. “This is one of the first ones that is happening at scale.”
The significance, he argues, is not the capital raised but the precedent set. Those institutions had to work through the risk allocation required to lend against a data centre as a standalone asset, the kind of structuring long established in power and water, and largely absent in digital infrastructure.
“This financing is not a milestone for DataVolt. This financing is a milestone for the industry,” he says. “Whatever we do, we always realise that to be successful, you cannot be successful alone. You have to make the industry succeed. If the industry succeeds, by default, you will succeed.”
Green power, and a cooperative grid
The Tashkent facility runs on renewable power around the clock, an arrangement Nanda says was reached with the grid rather than around it.
“Our data centre, without any cost burden, is green. We have worked very closely with the grid in order to create a mechanism through which we are using some of the renewable plants in the grid, directly attached to our data centre and able to generate 24 by 7 green power. It’s a play of wind and solar. The solar runs during the daytime and the wind runs during the night.”
Grid readiness is one of the sector’s most persistent bottlenecks, particularly in emerging markets. Nanda says Uzbekistan proved an exception.
“We haven’t encountered any such challenge, to be very honest. We have found the regulatory regime and both the political will to be extremely supportive, friendly and progressive. A lot of what we have been able to do is because our creativity has been reciprocated.”
The contrast, he suggests, is with markets where unconventional proposals die in process. “The issue in many of the countries is when you go with no cookie-cutter ideas, but with creative ideas, it just burns you out. It takes so much time to deal with the bureaucracy.”
The geo-economics argument
The larger thesis concerns Saudi Arabia, and it rests on three legs.
The first is energy. Nanda points to utility-scale green power produced in the kingdom at around two cents per kilowatt hour, a figure he claims is 30 to 40 per cent below Chinese equivalents. “And we know that China is legendary in the world for producing everything cheap.”
The second is connectivity. “Saudi has over the last nine, ten years invested heavily in terms of connectivity on the subsea cables. Today, 17 subsea cables land in the kingdom, and in the next two years those 17 are becoming 24.” Combined with terrestrial fibre, he argues, this is what makes compute exportable rather than merely local.
And local demand, he is blunt, is beside the point. Saudi capacity today sits at roughly 300MW and is expected to reach around 800MW by 2030 or 2031. “That’s not what is moving the needle for us. We are doing these AI factories to be the factories of the world, the compute factories of the world.”
The third leg is the one he thinks the market overlooks entirely.
“We hear about geopolitics, but no one talks about the geo-economics,” he says. “What I mean is the country’s strategic location vis-à-vis the world’s population.”
From Saudi Arabia, he argues, roughly half the world’s population sits inside a 120-millisecond latency envelope: 1.4 billion people in Africa directly across the Red Sea, around two billion across South and Southeast Asia, 450 million in Europe, and a further 350 million reachable via Europe to the US.
“So, wherever you need compute power which can be done within those 120 milliseconds of latency, that is your addressable market. And that’s half the world.”
The ambition follows from the arithmetic. “Just as much as the kingdom is today one of the world’s largest exporters of oil, in the next eight, ten years we want the kingdom to be one of the largest exporters of compute.”
The vehicle for that is the campus at NEOM’s Oxagon, which DataVolt is developing at 1.5GW. Nanda expects to break ground within roughly 12 weeks, with a first phase of a couple of hundred megawatts.
Talent before concrete
Asked about localisation, Nanda’s answer is unusually emphatic.
“We believe that infrastructure development, especially critical and strategic infrastructure like data centres, without talent development is a battle that is dead on arrival.”
DataVolt began training before it began building. “One of the first things that we did after the formation of this company is we did not invest in hard infrastructure,” he says. Working through the Energy & Water Academy, a vocational institute the group had already used for its power business, DataVolt began putting young Saudis through a three-year programme, equivalent to an undergraduate degree, to qualify as certified data centre operators, with an even split between men and women.
The same model is running in Uzbekistan, where the company has committed that all data centre operators will be Uzbek nationals by 2029.
Demand for the places has outstripped anything the company modelled. For a data science and AI diploma launched about six weeks before the interview, DataVolt offered 100 seats and expected around 400 applications. Applicants had to hold an undergraduate degree and come from outside the kingdom’s major cities.
“By day four, we closed the applications. We had 16,500 applications for 100 seats.”
What keeps him up
Nanda divides risk into the controllable and the uncontrollable. Talent, he argues, belongs firmly in the first category. “If you invest in it, you can control it. The problem is that most business leaders run after the business and later find out that, oh, I forgot about the talent that needs to run this.”
The uncontrollable one is silicon.
“The only thing around which, from time to time, we have challenges in our mind, because of the geopolitics, is the access of the data centres to what we call the chips. Access to chips is not a slam dunk. It’s not a commodity that you can just go to the internet and order on one of these e-commerce platforms. It’s a highly regulated and controlled element.”
For now, he says, the kingdom’s relationship with the US, where the advanced GPUs are made, works in its favour.
That uncertainty is, in his telling, the defining condition of the industry. Unlike other sectors, he argues, the pace is set not only by technology but by geopolitics, and both are moving at once.
“I go to bed thinking the world is in a particular shape every night, but when I wake up in the morning, I think I am born to another planet. That is the pace at which this industry is moving.”
Ask him what makes it worth it and the answer returns to the cohorts, not the campuses.
“When I meet these young boys and girls between the ages of 18 and 22, and I see the energy in them, the hunger in them, how they want to conquer the world on the back of artificial intelligence, how they want to contribute to the digital revolution. When you provide the means and tools to them, there is nothing more satisfying in your life.”
