By Hamza Faisal
A consortium led by Omani investment group Mubbadrah Investment has unveiled plans for a $3 billion 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 Sultan Haitham bin Tarik's state visit to the United Kingdom, Trade Arabia reported on October 24.
The campus is designed for hyperscale computing operators and will host large-scale AI training and inference workloads. The consortium says the $3 billion figure is the initial investment, with scope for expansion as demand grows — though no construction timescale has been disclosed, so the project remains an announcement rather than operating capacity for now.
Who is building it
Mubbadrah, a diversified Omani investment group with more than 20 companies in its portfolio, is working with three partners: investment advisory firm Sustopia Capital, US data centre developer Vela Tech, and Dubai-based renewable energy developer O2 Global Energy. Sustopia and Vela say they are developing, designing and constructing about 20 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity worldwide, and Vela cites work on the Stargate project in Abilene, Texas.
Energy is central to the plan. The campus will draw power from the national grid and renewable sources, and O2 Global Energy will develop 400 megawatts of solar generation backed by battery storage for the site. For AI infrastructure, securing reliable power at scale is often the hardest part of the build — the solar pairing is meant to answer that question before construction starts.
Crusoe's interest — and its limits
US AI infrastructure company Crusoe has expressed interest in becoming a potential off-taker for the facility's data centre capacity. That interest is not yet a firm commitment: the consortium anticipates formalising it within the coming weeks as work moves forward, and no customer contract has been announced.
The distinction matters. Data centre announcements routinely name interested parties long before servers are ordered, and capacity only becomes real when a customer signs and power is delivered. Until Crusoe or another operator commits, the 400 megawatts should be read as a planned ceiling, not a sold-out facility.
Oman's second hyperscale bet in a week
The Mubbadrah announcement is the second hyperscale-scale AI data centre project tied to the Sultan's UK visit in the same week. The other is a large-scale facility in Salalah to be developed by UK-founded infrastructure investor Yamna, whose first phase alone is expected to exceed £1 billion. The two projects are separate — different developers, different sites — but together they signal how aggressively Oman is courting AI infrastructure investment.
The push fits Oman's Vision 2040 programme of diversifying beyond hydrocarbons, with the digital economy targeted for a much larger share of national output. Whether the strategy pays off will depend on execution: signed customers, delivered power, and construction timelines that the announcements have yet to spell out. The next milestones to watch are a formal Crusoe commitment and a dated build schedule.
By Hamza Faisal
