Editorial Article
Six Gigawatts of Concrete: What a Data Hall Actually Specifies
The largest construction programme in the Gulf is not a city. It is a building type. Humain, the Public Investment Fund’s AI company, has tendered infrastructure works for a 6-gigawatt data centre campus in east Riyadh — about 24 square kilometres at Al-Saad, developed in phases across six plots of 1 GW each, with bids due on 8 May 2026 (trade press reporting of the tender, May 2026). Read that against the rest of the regional pipeline and the conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone holding a demand model built on towers: the chemistry-intensive work in the Gulf is migrating toward a building type that almost nobody in this category has modelled.
For construction chemicals, the interesting question is not how large the campus is. It is what a data hall specifies that a residential or commercial tower does not — and why the specification is decided by exposure class and design life rather than by floor count.
The money is real, and it is arriving in tranches
In January 2026, Humain and the National Infrastructure Fund announced a strategic financing framework of up to USD 1.2 billion, covering the development of up to 250 MW of hyperscale AI data centre capacity. In May, Reuters reported that Humain had engaged Goldman Sachs on a financing package for 2 GW — roughly a third of its target by 2034 — that could be worth at least SAR 20 billion, which Reuters put at USD 5.33 billion. Across the 2 GW it funds, that is about USD 2.67 billion per gigawatt of financing (Pheonix Research calculation).
That figure is a financing package covering data centres and GPU chips, not a construction cost estimate, and it should not be used as one. But it establishes the order of magnitude of what a single owner is committing to a single programme, and it explains why the specification on these buildings is written by people with an engineering organisation behind them rather than by a contractor working to a minimum.
The capacity is also not coming from one owner. In December 2025, stc’s digital infrastructure subsidiary center3 and Humain announced a joint venture to develop and operate AI data centres capable of hosting up to 1 GW of AI workloads, starting with an initial capacity of up to 250 MW. Two different structures — a sovereign AI platform and a telecom-led joint venture — pointing at the same physical requirement.
Exposure class, not floor count
In an ordinary building, the enclosure is a comfort and weather measure. In a data hall it is an asset-protection measure, and the difference changes what gets specified.
Gulf groundwater and soils carry sulphates and chlorides that attack reinforced concrete, and the region’s coastal and near-coastal sites push substructures up the exposure ladder regardless of how tall the building is. That is the first gate. A tower and a data hall on adjacent plots may face the same ground, but they do not carry the same consequence: a basement leak in a residential tower is a facilities ticket, and a basement leak under a data hall is an outage with a contractual event attached to it. The specification responds to the consequence, not only to the chemistry.
The second gate is the envelope, and here the important word is continuity. A data hall is not judged on whether the membrane looks correct at handover. It is judged on whether water crossed it. That means the specified system is only as good as its treatment of construction joints, pile caps, penetrations, service entries and the interface between below-grade waterproofing and the slab — the details that are a rounding error on a bill of quantities and the actual point of failure in a below-grade structure. A product that performs on a test panel and is not installed as a tested system is a liability with a datasheet.
This is why the data hall wave rewards suppliers who sell assemblies rather than pails, and why the approval regimes described elsewhere in this series matter here more than anywhere. The buyer is not asking what the membrane is made of. The buyer is asking who warrants the assembly.
Compartmentation is per-configuration, not per-product
The third gate is fire, and it is the one where the Gulf’s regulatory structure is most explicit — and least understood outside the region.
The UAE Fire and Life Safety Code of Practice devotes a chapter to fire stopping, covering classification of firestop systems, design and selection, product requirements, submittal, quality assurance and installer qualification. The Civil Defence submittal requirements are specific in a way that should be familiar to anyone who has read the Gulf’s product-approval tariff: products within a system must carry a design listing and approval label conforming to the construction type, penetrant type, annular space, joint gap and fire-rating requirement of each separate assembly. Where no tested and listed system exists for a particular configuration, the manufacturer must provide a site-specific Engineering Judgment, stamped and accepted by the consultant and the firestop contractor. Method statements are required. The manufacturer’s or installer’s warranty must run for a minimum of ten years. And manufacturers must submit an undertaking that supplying non-compliant material is illegal and punishable.
Note what that structure does. It does not approve a sealant. It approves a sealant, in an annular space of a stated size, around a stated penetrant, in a stated construction, at a stated rating. The unit of approval is the configuration — which means the certificate portfolio logic that governs products in Abu Dhabi and Dubai governs systems here, and it scales with the number of penetrations and assemblies a project contains. A data hall is a building made almost entirely of penetrations and compartments.
The façade regime runs the same way, and the documentation is unusually clear about it. Under Dubai Civil Defence material test standards, a product or panel approval is the manufacturer’s responsibility and is tested for flame spread, droplets and smoke emission of core, skin, adhesive and panel — and the certificate it earns permits installation only on low-rise buildings. Approval of a wall system or assembly is a separate test, and the responsibility of the consultant and façade contractor. Where a manufacturer undertakes both, the registration covers the full system and permits installation on the exterior façade of any building, provided the fabricated arrangement matches the tested assembly.
That is a remarkably precise statement of what a certificate is worth: the document determines the height of building on which the product may be used. Not the performance. The paperwork.
What it does to the commercial picture
Three consequences follow, and they point in the same direction.
Value per square metre rises, but so does the cost of being wrong. A data hall carries more specified chemistry per square metre than an equivalent-floorplate residential tower, because the enclosure is protecting equipment many times the value of the structure. That is good for anyone selling systems. It is bad for anyone selling products, because a single failed assembly on a campus of this size is a relationship event, not a warranty claim.
Specification is centralised and binary. A hyperscale owner writes one design and applies it across sites. Pheonix Research counts six tier-1 players in the GCC against ten globally, and assesses regulatory complexity as High. Both readings work in the incumbent’s favour here: when a buyer standardises, they standardise on suppliers who can already produce a compliant file in every emirate, on the owner’s schedule.
The certification burden travels with the building type. Firestop per configuration, façade per assembly, below-grade per system — a data hall multiplies all three. The marginal cost of the sixty-first model may be trivial, but the marginal cost of the four-hundredth penetration detail is not, and it is borne by whoever has to paper it.
Three things that would break the thesis
Power, not concrete, is the binding constraint. Every one of these projects is a power project with a building attached. Grid connection, generation and cooling water set the schedule; the chemistry follows the pour. If connection timelines slip, the demand shifts rather than disappears — but a slipped data hall does not consume membrane this year.
Modular delivery moves the envelope off-site. If the region adopts prefabricated or containerised data hall modules at scale, a meaningful share of the enclosure chemistry is applied in a factory that may not be in the Gulf at all. The site work that remains is foundations, slabs and services — real, but a fraction of the specified value. This is the most plausible route by which a data centre boom fails to become a construction chemicals boom.
A global approved-products list. Hyperscalers already run global vendor standards. The more those standards are written centrally and accepted locally, the less the Gulf’s per-emirate certificate structure functions as a moat and the more it functions as a delay — and delays get designed out by buyers with schedule risk.
What to watch
Two disclosures will settle it. First, whether the tender packages on the Riyadh campus specify systems or products — a systems specification is a different competitive field from a product one, and it is visible in the documents long before it is visible in the revenue. Second, whether the approved-supplier lists on these programmes are dominated by the six incumbents or open to regional blenders. The first tells you what is being sold. The second tells you who is allowed to sell it.
The regional picture — approval regimes, plant economics and the specification pathway — is set out in the GCC Construction Chemicals market report, with the global product-family breakdown in the Waterproofing and Construction Chemicals market report.
Read this with
The Certificate Portfolio explains the fee schedule and the per-model, per-emirate structure that a data hall multiplies. Local-for-Local explains why the plants supplying these programmes are being built inside the border. And Thirty Percent of the Chemistry Is Waterproofing explains why the below-grade line is the one that earns the capacity.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Saudi data centre programme for construction chemicals?
Humain, the PIF's AI company, has tendered infrastructure works for a 6 GW data centre campus in east Riyadh — about 24 square kilometres at Al-Saad across six 1 GW plots, with bids due 8 May 2026. It also has a joint venture with stc's center3 for up to 1 GW of AI workload capacity, starting at up to 250 MW, and a USD 1.2 billion financing framework with the National Infrastructure Fund covering up to 250 MW of hyperscale capacity.
Why does a data hall specify more construction chemistry per square metre than a tower?
Because the specification responds to the consequence of failure, not only to the chemistry. Gulf groundwater and soils carry sulphates and chlorides that push substructures up the exposure-class ladder regardless of building height, and below-grade waterproofing in a data hall is protecting equipment many times the value of the structure. A basement leak in a tower is a facilities ticket; under a data hall it is an outage with a contractual event attached.
How does the UAE Fire and Life Safety Code regulate firestop systems?
Per configuration, not per product. Products within a system must carry a design listing and approval label conforming to the construction type, penetrant type, annular space, joint gap and fire rating of each separate assembly. Where no tested and listed system exists, a site-specific Engineering Judgment is required, stamped by the consultant and the firestop contractor. Warranties must run a minimum of ten years.
What could stop the Gulf data centre boom becoming a construction chemicals boom?
Three things: power and grid connection timelines, since every one of these projects is a power project with a building attached; modular or prefabricated delivery, which moves envelope chemistry into a factory that may not be in the Gulf; and hyperscaler global approved-products lists, which convert the region's per-emirate certificate regime from a moat into a delay.