Saudi Arabia is seeking to cement its position as a regional technology manufacturing hub as Lenovo prepares to begin commercial production at its new Riyadh plant in late 2026. The facility, Lenovo’s largest outside China, will be the company’s first worldwide to manufacture laptops, desktops, servers and Motorola smartphones at a single site, serving markets across the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa.
Lenovo unveiled its first laptop manufactured in Saudi Arabia at the LEAP 2026 technology conference in Riyadh, marking a shift in its partnership with Alat, a company owned by the Public Investment Fund, from investment and capacity building to the domestic production of technology devices. Salman Faqeeh, Lenovo’s vice president and general manager for Saudi Arabia, said the Riyadh facility has been designed to produce Lenovo’s product portfolio over time, including PCs, desktop computers, servers and Motorola smartphones, describing it as the company’s first plant worldwide to produce all four product categories together at a single site.
The Riyadh facility is being built on a site covering about 200,000 square meters at Riyadh Integrated, operated by the Special Integrated Logistics Zone near King Khalid International Airport. The project forms part of a strategic partnership between Lenovo and Alat aimed at developing an industrial and technology manufacturing base serving the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa, with Lenovo having officially opened its regional headquarters in Riyadh in April 2026 as part of broader plans to expand its manufacturing and research and development operations in the kingdom.
Faqeeh said Lenovo was seeing growing demand in Saudi Arabia and the wider region for artificial intelligence enabled devices, infrastructure and services as organizations moved beyond experimentation toward deploying the technology more broadly, with government, financial services, energy, manufacturing, retail, education, healthcare and sports among the sectors driving that growth. The company is also continuing work to establish a research and development center and a customer experience center in Saudi Arabia, having appointed Rabeah Al-Zaidy to lead its local research and development initiatives, with the first group of Saudi engineers having already completed training at Lenovo manufacturing facilities around the world to support local operations.
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