There Are Two LEAPs. Brands Keep Preparing for the Wrong One.

LEAP 2026 opens in Riyadh this week as the largest technology gathering in the region. But the $14.9 billion that made last year's headlines describes a partnership economy almost no visiting brand can enter. The opportunity is real, it's just not the one the number implies.

Every February since 2022, one figure has travelled out of Riyadh faster than anything else LEAP produces: a dollar total. Fourteen-point-nine billion in 2025. Thirteen-point-four the year before. It lands in trade press, in board decks, in the "why we should exhibit" memo circulating inside marketing departments across the Gulf and beyond.

That number is doing something quiet and slightly misleading to how brands decide whether to show up.

It reads as proof that LEAP is where partnerships get signed — so a brand books a stand, briefs a business-development team, and arrives expecting to convert proximity into a deal. Then it discovers that the deals behind the headline were never available to it in the first place.

Understanding why is the most useful preparation a brand can do before it commits budget to LEAP 2026, which runs 31 August–3 September at the Riyadh Exhibition & Convention Centre in Malham — its fifth edition, and the first to move off its traditional February date.

What LEAP actually is, before the interpretation starts

The facts, stated plainly:

• Scale. LEAP is organised by Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming and Drones, and Tahaluf (an Informa joint venture). Attendance ran from 100,000+ at its 2022 debut to 215,000+ in 2024, then eased to 201,000+ in 2025. Organisers are targeting roughly 201,000 again for 2026, alongside more than 600 startups, 1,800 exhibiting brands and 1,900 investors.
• The headline totals. Per the Ministry, the first three editions produced $29.3 billion in announced launches and investments; 2024 added $13.4 billion; 2025 added $14.9 billion, of which the Ministry attributed more than $10.9 billion to infrastructure, AI and startup funding rounds.
• The move. The 2026 edition shifted from February to the end of August. Organisers frame the change as a way to widen international participation; sessions run in fully air-conditioned halls against Riyadh's late-summer heat.

Everything above is verifiable. What the number means for a brand is a separate question — and this is where most planning goes wrong.

The $14.9 billion is a specific species of deal

Read the 2025 announcements individually and a pattern is immediate.

DataVolt committed $5 billion with NEOM to build a data centre at Oxagon. Alat, owned by the Public Investment Fund, put $2 billion into an AI-and-robotics manufacturing tie-up with Lenovo. Aramco Digital signed a $1.5 billion cloud-computing partnership with Groq. Alfanar pledged $1.4 billion for four data centres; Mobily $905 million for subsea cable and data-centre projects. Salesforce, Databricks, Tencent Cloud, SambaNova and KKR added cloud-region, platform and data-centre commitments on top.

Now look at who is on the Saudi side of each: PIF-backed entities, Aramco, national telcos, sovereign-scale developers. The pattern holds because the deals are all the same thing — capital-intensive AI infrastructure, contracted between the Saudi state's investment apparatus and a short list of global compute suppliers.

That apparatus has only consolidated since the last LEAP. HUMAIN, the PIF-owned national AI company established in 2025, now anchors a reported $100 billion compute build-out, with partnerships spanning NVIDIA, a $10 billion agreement with AMD, AWS, Qualcomm, Google Cloud and xAI. When AMD's chief executive appeared personally at LEAP 2025, it was to underline a deal of that class — not to browse the exhibition floor.

This is the reasonable inference, flagged as inference: LEAP's headline figure is best read not as a marketplace outcome but as a sovereign signalling event. The Kingdom uses the world's most-attended tech stage to announce, in one concentrated week, the infrastructure commitments that advance its Vision 2030 compute ambitions. The number measures how much the host wanted to signal. It does not measure how much was available to everyone watching.

The second LEAP, the one most brands are actually attending.

Strip away the mega-deals and a different event remains, and it is a large one: 1,800 brands, hundreds of startups, nearly two thousand investors and 200,000 visitors in the same halls for four days.

Its currency is not the nine-figure infrastructure contract. It is visibility in front of a buyer base that is difficult to assemble anywhere else in the region, access to distribution and channel relationships, and the startup-to-investor matching that occasionally produces a genuine step-change. Ejari, a Saudi startup, is the case organisers cite: it began with a small LEAP booth and used the exposure to raise a $1 million seed round, later followed by a reported $15 million.

That is the real opportunity, and it is worth taking seriously. But notice what it is not. It is not a signed partnership announced from a keynote stage. It is slower, less quotable, and measured in pipeline rather than press releases.

The mistake brands make is importing the expectations of the first LEAP into the second one — arriving to "sign a partnership" because the headline said partnerships happen here, then judging a fundamentally top-of-funnel event by bottom-of-funnel criteria it was never going to meet.

Which LEAP is yours?

The strategic question is not should we go but which economy do we belong to — because the answer dictates everything downstream: who you send, what you spend, and how you'll know whether it worked.

If you are a compute, cloud, chip or large-scale infrastructure player, LEAP is a sovereign-access event. Your objective is a relationship with the state's investment apparatus, your delegation is senior, and success looks like a deal — or the credible beginning of one. For this group, the headline number is the game.

If you are almost any other kind of brand — consumer, fintech, enterprise SaaS, agency, regional challenger — LEAP is a visibility-and-pipeline event. Your objective is qualified attention and relationships that mature after the halls close. Sending a business-development team to "close" is a category error; sending people who can generate and nurture pipeline is not. For this group, the headline number is a distraction, and treating it as a benchmark guarantees disappointment.

There is also a timing signal worth reading. The move to late August, and the flat attendance target after a dip, suggest a platform optimising for quality of participation — deeper international attendance, less domestic-February crowding — rather than another record-attendance headline. A brand deciding how heavily to invest should weight the composition of the room over its raw size.

The SOOGK Take

LEAP is not overhyped. It is precisely as significant as its organisers claim — as a sovereign compute-and-capital stage. The problem is that its most portable metric, the annual deal total, is the wrong yardstick for the visitors most likely to read it. It advertises a game that a dozen players can enter and is consumed by an audience of thousands who cannot.

The transferable lesson runs past LEAP entirely.

An event's headline deal figure tells you what the host wants to signal, not what is available to you. Every flagship gathering — LEAP, GITEX, the summit circuit — publishes a number engineered to establish the host's importance. Brands routinely mistake that number for a market they can transact in. The discipline is to decompose the figure before you budget against it: who are the counterparties, what class of deal does it represent, and is your organisation on either side of that table? If it isn't, the event may still be worth every riyal — but for a completely different reason, measured by a completely different metric.

Before you book the stand, don't ask whether deals get signed at LEAP. Ask which of the two LEAPs you're actually attending — and make sure the number you're there to move is one you can reach.