IBM and Lenovo unite for $300 billion Arab AI
IBM and Lenovo announced an expansion of their strategic technology partnership at the LEAP 2025 exhibition in Riyadh. The goal of the collaboration is the large-scale implementation of generative artificial intelligence for clients in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
According to IDC forecasts, global spending on artificial intelligence systems will exceed $300 billion by 2026. Leading organizations in Saudi Arabia are actively exploring and investing in generative AI technologies, preparing for the era of “AI everywhere.”
Building on a 20-year partnership, the companies will combine technologies from IBM’s watsonx portfolio, including the Arabic language model ALLaM, developed by the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), with Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions. The new solutions will help government and commercial clients in the kingdom accelerate AI adoption to improve government services and data-driven decision making in areas such as fraud detection, public safety, customer service, code modernization, and IT operations.
“Today’s announcement represents an important step in the long-standing relationship between IBM and Lenovo,” noted Giovanni Di Filippo, President of the EMEA region in Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group. He emphasized the importance of combining IBM’s generative AI solutions with Lenovo’s infrastructure solutions for local use and cloud services.
Organizations in Saudi Arabia have already gained access to ALLaM through the watsonx platform, allowing them to use advanced AI capabilities to train, customize, and deploy the model, as well as run AI workloads on Lenovo infrastructure both locally and in the cloud. The new solutions will provide clients with additional opportunities to use generative AI with an emphasis on transparency, trust, and choice.
“IBM and Lenovo have a rich history of joint innovation and partnership spanning two decades,” said Ayman AlRashid, IBM Regional Vice President in Saudi Arabia. He noted that the collaboration will combine Lenovo’s infrastructure offerings and IBM’s AI solutions portfolio, utilizing small, efficient open-source models focused on specific use cases and geographic requirements.
