A consortium led by Mubbadrah Investment has unveiled plans to build a 3 billion dollar artificial intelligence data centre in Oman, with planned capacity of up to 400 megawatts. The project was announced at a signing ceremony in London during the state visit to the United Kingdom of Sultan Haitham bin Tarik, and it is intended for hyperscale operators running large-scale AI training and inference workloads, with room to expand beyond the initial build.
Mubbadrah, an Omani diversified investment group formed in Muscat in 2005 with more than 20 companies across energy, mining, manufacturing, information technology, real estate and healthcare, is working with three partners. Sustopia Capital is an investment advisory firm, Vela Tech is a United States data centre developer, and O2 Global Energy is a Dubai-based renewable energy developer. Together, the group says it combines local knowledge with global capital, technology and development experience.
Power is central to the plan, as it is for every large AI campus. The facility will draw electricity from the national grid and from renewable sources, and O2 Global Energy is set to develop 400 megawatts of solar generation backed by battery storage to supply additional clean energy. That matching figure matters: a 400-megawatt data centre is a major new load on any power system, and pairing it with new generation is increasingly how developers answer questions about grid impact and emissions.
The partners bring substantial claimed scale elsewhere. According to the announcement, Sustopia Capital and Vela Tech are developing, designing and constructing roughly 20 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity worldwide. Sustopia points to a 5-gigawatt data centre platform spanning Denmark, the United States and the United Kingdom, and describes Oman as a strategic extension of it. Vela Tech cites earlier work that includes the Stargate site in Abilene, Texas.
One potential customer has already surfaced. Crusoe, a United States company specialising in AI infrastructure and cloud computing, has expressed interest in taking capacity at the Oman campus as an off-taker, and the consortium expects to formalise that interest within the coming weeks. That interest is not yet a firm commitment, and the announcement gave no construction timescale. Projects of this size are typically built out in phases over several years as customer commitments are secured.
The Oman plan also does not stand alone. It was the second hyperscale-scale AI data centre project announced for the country in the same week, both tied to the Sultan's visit, after United Kingdom-founded Yamna signed an agreement for a large facility in Salalah whose first phase is expected to exceed 1 billion pounds. Taken together, the deals underline how Gulf states are competing to host the next wave of AI infrastructure, offering energy resources, land and government backing while demand for compute continues to outrun supply in established markets.
What to watch next is straightforward: whether Crusoe's interest becomes a signed agreement, whether a site and timetable are disclosed, and how the solar and storage build is sequenced alongside the data halls. Announcements are the easy part of the data centre business. Turning 3 billion dollars and 400 megawatts on paper into operating capacity is the test that will decide whether Oman becomes a genuine regional AI hub.