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This week, all eyes were on º£½ÇÖ±²¥ as Riyadh hosted the 9th Future Investment Initiative, a gathering of the world’s most influential investors, policymakers, and innovators.

The conversations shaping the future of the global economy were happening there, and the topic that dominated every panel and private discussion was AI infrastructure. 

From boardrooms to ministries, the question is no longer if artificial intelligence will transform economies, it is how fast, and who controls the architecture behind it.

For º£½ÇÖ±²¥, that question goes to the heart of Vision 2030 and the Kingdom’s ambition to lead the world in data, compute, and digital services. 

One of the most important conversations underway at FII9 is about AI sovereignty, the principle that nations should control their own data, algorithms, and computing infrastructure. In practical terms, AI sovereignty means ensuring that º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s technological destiny is not dependent on foreign code, proprietary platforms, or opaque systems. 

As º£½ÇÖ±²¥ races to deliver Vision 2030’s ambitions, from the Red Sea Project and Expo 2030, to the Humain and initiatives taken by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, it must also ensure that the infrastructure driving those projects is secure, scalable, and sovereign. 

AI sovereignty is not simply about autonomy. It is about resilience: ensuring that the Kingdom’s critical systems in energy, logistics, education, and healthcare remain operational, auditable, and trusted under any geopolitical or economic scenario.

It is about ensuring that the intelligence powering º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s future is Saudi intelligence, aligned with national priorities, and protected by design. 

º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s giga-projects are creating a demand for AI-ready infrastructure on a scale rarely seen anywhere in the world. To meet that demand, the country must build systems that are transparent, secure by design, and scalable without hidden costs. 

Transparency matters because AI now influences decisions in everything from urban planning to healthcare and national security. Saudi entities must be able to see inside their systems to audit, monitor, and validate performance. Only transparent operating systems can ensure compliance with the National Data Management Office’s regulations and align with Vision 2030’s human-centric principles of accountability, ethics, and quality of life. 

Security by design is needed to make sure that protection is built into the architecture, not bolted on after the fact. As the scale of data and compute expands, cyber-resilience becomes a pillar of national strength. Embedding security at every layer, from hardware and operating system to application and AI model, is the only way to guarantee trust in a digital era where threats evolve as fast as technologies. 

And scalability without hidden costs will ensure that º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s AI economy grows sustainably without being trapped by restrictive licensing, opaque pricing, or cloud lock-ins that limit innovation. 

At the heart of every AI ecosystem lies an operating system, the unseen layer that determines how data, compute, and collaboration happen. That layer is where sovereignty begins. 
Enterprise-grade open-source operating systems, such as Rocky Linux from CIQ, provide exactly the attributes that governments and enterprises now demand. 

This philosophy of openness, security, and scalability, is the foundation upon which sovereign AI infrastructure can be built. It ensures that nations like º£½ÇÖ±²¥ maintain control over their technology stack, while still benefiting from the power of global collaboration.

In contrast, proprietary systems often conceal complexity, obscure vulnerabilities, and impose licensing models that make innovation expensive and inflexible. The future demands the opposite: platforms that empower, not entrap; systems that foster national capability, not dependency. 

º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s leadership has set out one of the most ambitious national digital transformation programs in the world. Under the guidance of SDAIA and the broader Vision 2030 framework, the Kingdom is building AI infrastructure, data centers, and compute capabilities that will rival and connect with global leaders.

In doing so, º£½ÇÖ±²¥ is also demonstrating something larger, that AI sovereignty is not isolationism, but intelligent independence. It means working with trusted global partners to build capacity at home, ensuring that Saudi developers, engineers, and institutions have full control, visibility, and choice in the technologies they deploy. 

At CIQ, we see this model taking shape in º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s emerging data ecosystems, its AI-ready cloud infrastructure, and its determination to lead the conversation on responsible, sovereign innovation. 

Conversations about AI sovereignty are urgent and necessary. Decisions made in 2025 about infrastructure, regulation, and architecture will determine how the Kingdom’s data and digital assets are managed for decades to come. 

If sovereignty is not hardwired into the foundations today, it will be costly, or even impossible, to retrofit later. That is why now is the time to design AI infrastructure that is transparent, secure by design, and scalable without hidden costs. 

The Kingdom’s journey toward AI sovereignty is already well underway. The challenge and opportunity now is to ensure that every byte of data, every algorithm, and every decision aligns with the same principle that drives Vision 2030 itself: empowerment, excellence, and independence. 

• Bjorn Hovland is chief operating officer of CIQ.