From Adoption to Creation: HP Deepens Its Bet on Saudi Arabia's AI Economy

Saudi Arabia has become one of HP's most strategic markets worldwide, with the company now moving beyond selling technology in the Kingdom to building it there, spanning artificial intelligence research, local manufacturing, and workforce development, all tied to Vision 2030.

Manufacturing Goes Live

The headline milestone: HP's Riyadh manufacturing facility has moved into full commercial production, with devices now shipping to customers and partners across the Kingdom. Fadle Saad, managing director of HP's MENA regional headquarters, credited support from the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Investment with helping get the plant operational. For HP, device manufacturing and AI strategy are directly linked, as AI tools proliferate inside organizations, so does demand for the hardware that runs them.

An R&D Model Built Around Local Problems

HP's AI R&D Centre of Excellence, modeled on a similar operation the company runs in Spain, is designed to work backward from customer pain points rather than push technology out of a lab. The centre partners directly with Saudi businesses and academic institutions to identify problems worth solving with AI.

Two products have come out of that process so far:

HP AgentOne, an agentic AI platform for IT service management that captures support requests across email, voice, and direct employee channels, then routes or resolves them autonomously.

FlowMaster, an AI tool aimed at paperwork-heavy administrative work, reducing manual processing for enterprise back-office functions.

HP has also partnered with SAMI Advanced Electronics as part of its broader localization push, and launched the HP AI Academy to build AI skills among students and the existing workforce.

Adoption Is Accelerating Fast

The numbers underline why HP is leaning in now. Recent industry data cited by Saad shows Saudi AI adoption among workers has doubled year-on-year. More granular figures put real numbers behind that trend: 36% of Saudi knowledge workers report using employer-provided AI tools daily, rising to 46% among executives and 50% among IT leaders, evidence that AI use is not just growing but is most concentrated where technical and leadership decisions get made.

Saad also framed technology adoption as a culture issue, not just a productivity one, arguing that better tools directly improve employee engagement, a philosophy that is shaping both HP's device roadmap and its internal software development priorities.

Betting on the Next Generation

HP's ambitions extend past enterprise and government customers. Garage 2.0, an incubator programme inspired by the original HP Garage in Palo Alto, brings together startups, educators, and HP's own experts to help Saudi entrepreneurs move from idea to viable business. Saad sees this as a bet on Saudi Arabia's private sector expanding, a trend he expects to be one of Vision 2030's most significant long-term outcomes.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, the manufacturing plant, the R&D centre, the AI Academy, and Garage 2.0 mark a shift in how HP positions itself in the Kingdom: no longer just a vendor selling into Saudi Arabia, but a company building products, training talent, and manufacturing hardware from inside it. With government-backed infrastructure investment continuing and AI adoption compounding year over year, HP expects its role, and its stake, in the Kingdom's economic transformation to keep growing.