Alat — Saudi Arabia's $100 Billion Sustainable Manufacturing Champion

Alat: Saudi Arabia’s $100 Billion Sustainable Manufacturing Bet

Alat is PIF’s $100 billion Saudi sustainable manufacturing company, launched in February 2024 to localize advanced industrial production under Vision 2030. Its thesis combines clean-energy manufacturing, global joint ventures and domestic demand from AI infrastructure, smart buildings, electronics and industrial automation.

The company was established as a Public Investment Fund subsidiary chaired personally by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with an initial portfolio spanning advanced industrials, robotics, electronics, smart devices, smart buildings, smart appliances, smart health, electrification and next-generation infrastructure technologies. Its institutional ambition is to deliver 39,000 direct jobs and contribute approximately $9.3 billion in non-oil GDP by 2030.

The Alat trajectory through its first two operational years has been institutionally consequential and analytically complex in roughly equal measure. The launch announcements in February 2024 included four foundational partnerships — SoftBank Group on industrial robotics, Carrier Corporation on intelligent climate solutions, Dahua Technology on safety and surveillance solutions through the Alat AIVisio Technology Co. Ltd. joint venture, and the Saudi Technology and Security Comprehensive Control Co. (Tahakom) on smart mobility and intelligent cities. Subsequent commitments scaled the portfolio: a $2 billion strategic collaboration with Lenovo completed January 2025 establishing a 200,000-square-metre PC, server, and smart-device manufacturing facility in Riyadh’s Special Integrated Logistics Zone with first commercial production scheduled for 2026; an approximately €160 million ($187 million) joint venture with TK Elevator establishing Saudi Arabia’s first foreign-owned elevator and escalator manufacturing operation; the Carrier partnership including a 5,000-job R&D and manufacturing site for intelligent climate solutions; the SoftBank robotics joint venture with up to $150 million in initial committed investment to manufacture industrial robots and to begin establishing what Alat described as the foundation for 32,000 leading-edge factories in the Kingdom by 2025. The cumulative partnership volume reached approximately $14.9 billion in new AI-related investments announced at the 2025 LEAP technology event alone, of which the Lenovo $2 billion was the headline figure but only one component of a substantially broader portfolio.

Then, in early 2026, the trajectory pivoted sharply. Semafor reported in April 2026 that PIF had removed founding CEO Amit Midha — the former Dell Technologies executive who had built and led Alat since pre-launch in 2023 — and that the company had dropped its plans to invest in semiconductor production. The semiconductor team was reassigned, some staff were laid off, and Dr. Muhammad Nasser Aldawood, head of industrials and mining at PIF, was named acting CEO. The chip-strategy abandonment was reported to reflect a broader review of Vision 2030 spending plans amid pre-war oil price pressure and the structural difficulty of competing with the United States, European Union, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese semiconductor industrial policies that had each committed tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to domestic fabrication capacity following the post-pandemic supply chain reassessment. Alat’s resources earmarked for chips were reported to be redirecting toward Saudi Arabia’s broader plan to become a global data center hub — the strategy operationalised through HUMAIN and the broader Year of AI 2026 architecture. The other electronics manufacturing projects — Lenovo, Carrier, SoftBank, Dahua, TK Elevator, Tahakom — were confirmed to remain in active execution.

The Alat story as it stands in April 2026 is therefore institutionally distinctive: a $100 billion vehicle that has retained its capital commitment, retained its Crown Prince chairmanship, retained its core operational partnerships, and retained its broader sustainable manufacturing thesis, while simultaneously executing a leadership transition, abandoning what had been positioned as one of its flagship strategic priorities, and refocusing on the dimensions of its mandate where the underlying competitive economics actually support sustained Saudi industrial expansion. The institutional adaptability the trajectory implies is one of the more analytically interesting features of the broader Vision 2030 governance architecture, and Alat’s pivot is among the clearest examples of the pragmatic recalibration that has characterised the Saudi state’s engagement with Vision 2030 commitments through the second and third phases of the programme.

Quick Facts

• Established: 1 February 2024 by HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
• Owner: Public Investment Fund (PIF) — wholly owned subsidiary
• Headquarters: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• Chairman: HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud
• Acting CEO (April 2026): Dr. Muhammad Nasser Aldawood (head of industrials and mining at PIF)
• Founding CEO: Amit Midha (former Dell Technologies — appointed 2023, removed early 2026)
• Investment budget to 2030: $100 billion (approximately SAR 367 billion)
• Initial scope: 34 product categories across nine business units
• Original business units: Advanced industrials · Semiconductors (abandoned 2026) · Smart devices · Smart buildings · Smart appliances · Smart health · Electrification · Next-generation infrastructure · AI infrastructure
• 2030 direct jobs target: 39,000
• 2030 non-oil GDP contribution target: ~$9.3 billion
• Carbon profile target: Zero-carbon manufacturing, powered by renewables
• Key partnerships: SoftBank · Carrier · Dahua · Tahakom · Lenovo · TK Elevator · KACST
• Lenovo collaboration: $2 billion (January 2025); 200,000 sq m factory in SILZ Riyadh; production from 2026
• Lenovo facility GDP contribution by 2030: Up to $10 billion
• Lenovo direct jobs: ~15,000; indirect: ~45,000
• TK Elevator JV: ~€160 million / $187 million — first foreign-owned elevator/escalator manufacturing in Saudi Arabia
• Dahua JV (Alat AIVisio): $200 million for vision-centric safety and surveillance products
• SoftBank robotics JV: Up to $150 million initial; first factory targeted December 2024 / early 2025
• Strategic anchor: Vision 2030 — non-oil industrial export doubling to $149 billion by 2030

What Alat Is

Alat — the name derives from the Arabic آلات, meaning “machines” — was established by Royal Directive of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on 1 February 2024, with the Crown Prince personally chairing the Board of Directors. The institutional positioning placed Alat alongside the very small set of PIF subsidiaries that the Crown Prince personally chairs — including HUMAIN, SDAIA, NEOM, Diriyah Company, and the broader portfolio of strategic-priority national champions. The chairmanship signal is consequential. Saudi institutional governance reserves Crown Prince personal chairmanship for those institutions whose strategic importance to Vision 2030 outcomes is judged to require the highest level of political accountability and the cabinet-level coordination authority that flows from direct Crown Prince oversight.

The strategic logic underpinning Alat operates on five distinct registers, each contributing to the institutional case for the substantial $100 billion capital commitment.

The first is economic diversification away from hydrocarbon dependence. Saudi Arabia’s commitment to raise non-oil GDP share, to double non-oil industrial exports from approximately $74 billion at Vision 2030 launch to approximately $149 billion by 2030, and to absorb the substantial Saudi youth population entering the workforce requires the development of contemporary technology manufacturing sectors at scales the Kingdom did not previously possess. Alat’s mandate to develop manufacturing capabilities across 34 product categories spanning nine business units is the operational expression of this diversification thesis, structured to produce both domestic supply substitution (replacing imports with Made-in-Saudi alternatives) and net non-oil exports (selling Saudi-manufactured products into regional and global markets).

The second register is carbon-zero manufacturing positioning. Alat is structured to manufacture using clean energy from inception, with Saudi Arabia’s substantial solar and wind resources providing the renewable electricity supply required to deliver near-zero-carbon manufactured products. The positioning is commercially significant. International manufacturers face progressively tightening carbon disclosure requirements, supply chain emissions reporting frameworks, and customer demand for low-carbon-intensity products. A Saudi manufacturing hub powered by clean energy can offer multinational customers products with substantially lower scope-3 emissions than equivalent products manufactured in coal-fired East Asian or natural-gas-fired North American facilities. The competitive proposition was central to SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son’s framing at the Alat launch: “Saudi Arabia’s vision, economic growth, and leading logistics location coupled with abundant access to green energy and Alat’s mandate to manufacture sustainably made this strategic partnership between us very compelling.”

The third register is regional manufacturing hub positioning. The Middle East and Africa together represent more than 1.7 billion consumers but currently host a fraction of the manufacturing capacity that the population would imply. Manufacturing is concentrated in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia), in North America, and in parts of Europe. Establishing Saudi Arabia as the regional manufacturing hub for the broader MEA region — leveraging the Kingdom’s geographic position, logistics infrastructure (King Abdullah Port, the Red Sea port complex, the Special Integrated Logistics Zone at Riyadh’s airport), and the financial scale that PIF can mobilise — represents an institutional opportunity with multi-decade strategic significance.

The fourth register is technology absorption through partnership. Alat’s institutional design centres on partnerships with global technology leaders — SoftBank for robotics, Carrier for HVAC and climate solutions, Dahua for vision-centric safety solutions, Lenovo for PCs and servers, TK Elevator for vertical transportation, Tahakom for intelligent transportation systems. Each partnership transfers manufacturing capability, technology depth, supply chain expertise, and operational knowledge from the partner into the Saudi industrial base. The accumulated technology absorption across the partnership portfolio, sustained over years of operation, is the mechanism through which Saudi Arabia’s broader industrial capability deepens.

The fifth register is employment generation at scale. The 39,000 direct-job target by 2030 — alongside the substantial indirect employment the surrounding supply chains imply — represents employment generation at scales that meaningfully contribute to the broader Vision 2030 youth employment and Saudisation objectives. The Lenovo factory alone is projected to generate approximately 15,000 direct jobs and 45,000 indirect jobs at full operation, putting the single facility within striking distance of half the total Alat direct-jobs target.

Leadership Transition — From Midha to Aldawood

The Alat leadership trajectory through its first two operational years is one of the more analytically interesting features of the broader Vision 2030 institutional landscape.

Amit Midha, the former Dell Technologies executive who had been responsible for Dell’s Asia-Pacific and Japan business — a multi-billion-dollar portfolio spanning more than 40 countries — was tapped as Alat CEO approximately a year before the company’s February 2024 public launch. The Midha appointment reflected the Saudi institutional preference for international operational expertise at senior leadership of national champion subsidiaries, particularly when the subsidiary’s mandate spans technology domains the Saudi industrial base did not previously have deep operating experience in. Midha’s career trajectory — multi-decade global technology operations leadership at Dell, smart-cities and emerging-market expertise — matched the institutional case for a CEO capable of building Alat’s commercial relationships across the global technology partner ecosystem.

The Midha-led launch period was operationally intense. Within weeks of the February 2024 launch, Alat had announced four foundational partnerships. By March 2024 LEAP, additional agreements with KACST were signed. By mid-2024, the SoftBank robotics joint venture was scaling toward first-factory operations. By January 2025, the Lenovo $2 billion strategic collaboration was finalised. By February 2025, the Lenovo manufacturing facility groundbreaking had been completed in conjunction with the fourth annual LEAP. The pace of partnership signing through the first 18 months was among the most intense of any Vision 2030 institutional launch.

Within that operational intensity, however, the semiconductor strategy that Midha had positioned at launch as a flagship priority — committing to a “semiconductor investment in 2024” with negotiations already underway at announcement — failed to materialise. According to Semafor’s April 2026 reporting, Alat’s “several attempts to invest in chipmakers and secure agreements to build chip plants in the kingdom failed due to competition from other countries.” The structural difficulty was unambiguous. Semiconductor fabrication plants typically cost tens of billions of dollars per facility, require multi-decade returns to justify the investment, and have become among the most politically contested industrial assets globally. The United States CHIPS and Science Act committed approximately $52 billion in federal subsidies to domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The European Chips Act committed approximately €43 billion. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan each committed substantial subsidies to maintain and expand their existing fabrication base. China committed substantially more through state investment and national champions. Saudi Arabia’s strategic case for inserting itself into this ecosystem — without the existing fabrication base, semiconductor design ecosystem, and decades of accumulated operational expertise that the established jurisdictions possessed — proved harder to translate into actual deal flow than the launch ambitions had implied.

In early 2026, PIF removed Midha from the CEO role. Dr. Muhammad Nasser Aldawood — head of industrials and mining at PIF — was named acting CEO “in accordance with the company’s governance framework” per the Alat spokesperson statement. The semiconductor team was reassigned. Some staff associated with the chip-strategy effort were laid off as part of the broader spending review. Resources earmarked for chips were redirected toward Saudi Arabia’s broader plan to become a global data center hub — the strategic priority operationalised through HUMAIN’s compute infrastructure build-out, the AWS Riyadh AI Zone, the xAI 500 MW facility, and the broader Year of AI 2026 architecture.

The leadership transition is institutionally distinctive for what it preserved and what it discontinued. The $100 billion capital commitment was preserved. The Crown Prince chairmanship was preserved. The non-semiconductor partnership portfolio was preserved. The core sustainable manufacturing thesis was preserved. The carbon-zero positioning was preserved. The 39,000-job and $9.3 billion non-oil GDP targets were not publicly revised. What was discontinued was the specific semiconductor strategy that had failed to convert ambition into deal flow against the structural competitive headwinds. The pragmatic adaptability the trajectory implies is one of the cleaner examples of the Saudi institutional capacity to recalibrate strategic priorities without abandoning the broader programme architecture.

The Operational Partnership Portfolio

Alat’s operational delivery against its non-semiconductor mandate has been substantial. The principal operating partnerships:

Lenovo — $2 Billion / 200,000 sq m Factory / 2026 Production Launch

The Lenovo collaboration is the largest single deal in the Alat portfolio. The relationship was structured in two phases. The original announcement in 2024 established the partnership framework. The $2 billion strategic collaboration was finalised in January 2025, comprising:

• Establishment of Lenovo’s regional Middle East and Africa headquarters in Riyadh
• Construction of a 200,000-square-metre sustainable manufacturing facility at the Special Integrated Logistics Zone (SILZ) “Riyadh Integrated” campus, 15 minutes from King Khalid International Airport
• Manufacturing of millions of PCs, servers, and smart devices annually for fully end-to-end “Saudi Made” products
• Local R&D teams integrated into the manufacturing operation
• Up to ~$10 billion contribution to Saudi non-oil GDP by 2030 (per Lenovo’s projections)
• Approximately 15,000 direct jobs and 45,000 indirect jobs at full operation

Groundbreaking occurred in February 2025 in conjunction with the fourth annual LEAP. Trial production phases were carried out through late 2025 and early 2026. Per Tareq Alangari, Lenovo President for Middle East, Africa, Türkiye and Pakistan, first full commercial production from the factory is scheduled for 2026 — marking what Alangari described to Al-Eqtisadiah as a “historic event in Saudi Arabia.” Supply operations to Saudi customers will commence alongside the start of exports to external markets.

The Lenovo relationship is structurally distinctive within the Alat portfolio because PIF, through Alat, holds a substantial equity-convertible position. The financial instruments are convertible into Lenovo shares, positioning PIF as one of Lenovo’s largest potential shareholders alongside the existing Lenovo shareholder base. The depth of equity participation — beyond pure manufacturing partnership — provides PIF with long-term upside in Lenovo’s global trajectory rather than purely Saudi-specific manufacturing economics.

Carrier Corporation — 5,000 Jobs / Intelligent Climate Solutions

The Carrier partnership combines Carrier’s HVAC technology and manufacturing capabilities with Alat’s financial strengths to develop made-in-Saudi-Arabia intelligent climate solutions. Carrier Chairman and CEO David Gitlin’s framing at announcement emphasised the structural opportunity: “Carrier has long had a presence in Saudi Arabia and we see significant growth opportunities in the region.” The partnership includes a 5,000-job R&D and manufacturing site for the development and production of intelligent climate solutions, with the operational build-out proceeding through 2025 and 2026.

SoftBank Robotics — Up to $150 Million / Industrial Automation

The SoftBank Group joint venture was the first operational partnership announced at Alat’s launch. The agreement structures a next-generation industrial automation business in Saudi Arabia manufacturing groundbreaking industrial robots using intellectual property developed by SoftBank and its affiliates. The partners committed to invest up to $150 million in the initial setup, with first factory operations targeted from late 2024 into early 2025. The strategic ambition framed at launch — “32,000 leading-edge factories in the Kingdom by 2025” — has not been delivered at the originally announced cadence (a hyper-aggressive timeline by any reasonable industrial benchmark), but the underlying robotics manufacturing operation has progressed.

Dahua Technology — $200 Million / Alat AIVisio

The Dahua joint venture established Alat AIVisio Technology Co. Ltd. — a $200 million joint venture for the production and marketing of vision-centric safety and surveillance solutions for smart cities, buildings, and enterprise environments. The Saudi-based manufacturing facility serves as the operational anchor for the joint venture’s global business, leveraging Dahua’s position as one of the leading global manufacturers in security and safety solutions while operating within the Saudi institutional and regulatory framework.

TK Elevator — €160 Million / First Foreign-Owned Elevator Manufacturing in Saudi Arabia

The TK Elevator joint venture, valued at approximately €160 million ($187 million), establishes Saudi Arabia’s first foreign-owned elevator and escalator manufacturing operation. The investment includes a product-development centre and training facility, providing the technology absorption and skills development that complement the manufacturing operation.

Tahakom — Smart Mobility and Intelligent Cities

The partnership with the Saudi Technology and Security Comprehensive Control Co. (Tahakom) — which already develops intelligent transportation systems, AI applications, and safety solutions — combines the two parties’ resources to advance smart mobility and intelligent city solutions in alignment with Vision 2030. The collaboration extends to solution design, product specifications, R&D and innovation functions, technology roadmaps, and the broader client and vendor ecosystem.

KACST — Talent Development and Joint Research

The agreement with the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) — formalised at the March 2024 LEAP — provides for industrial facilities and manufacturing solutions support, talent development for the broader technology workforce, and joint research using KACST’s advanced technology facilities.