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A consortium led by Omani investment group Mubbadrah Investment plans an AI data center campus of up to 400 MW in Salalah, Oman, backed by $3 billion of initial investment, DCD reported Wednesday. US AI infrastructure firm Crusoe has indicated interest in becoming an off-taker. The facility wou
Featured: Aerial perspective of a multi-building hyperscale campus site illustrating the scale of a 400 MW data center development.ld be purpose-built for hyperscale operators running large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
The project
The $3 billion covers the data center buildings, electricity supply, cooling, network connectivity and fiber, Mubbadrah chief executive Yasser Al Barami said, with tenants supplying their own servers and chips, TradeArabia reported. Power would come from the national grid, supplemented by 400 MW of solar generation with battery storage developed by Dubai-based O2 Global Energy. The consortium announced the project on Oct. 24 at a London event held during Sultan Haitham bin Tarik's three-day state visit to the UK, according to Utilities Middle East.
Future expansion is planned, though the consortium gave no construction timeline.
The consortium
Mubbadrah, formed in Muscat in 2005, is a diversified holding company with more than 20 subsidiaries across energy, mining, manufacturing, IT, real estate and healthcare, with energy its largest vertical, according to Middle East AI News. Its partners are London-based investment advisory Sustopia Capital, which runs a 5 GW data center platform spanning Denmark, the US and the UK, and US data center developer Vela Tech, which cites work on the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas.
"Oman has the stability, the strategic location and the energy resources to become a regional home for AI infrastructure," said Al Barami.
Sustopia and Vela Tech are together developing, designing and constructing about 20 GW of AI data center capacity worldwide, the consortium said.
Crusoe's interest
Crusoe's interest is not yet a commitment. The consortium expects to sign a confirmation of that interest in the coming weeks, TradeArabia reported. Denver-based Crusoe develops AI data center campuses and runs a GPU cloud service. Its 1.2 GW Abilene, Texas campus, backed by $11.6 billion in debt and equity raised in May 2025, has Oracle reported as the direct customer, with the site tied to OpenAI's Stargate program.
A second Salalah deal
The Mubbadrah project was one of two Salalah AI data center deals announced during the state visit, the first by an Omani sultan to the UK since 1982. On Oct. 21, the UK government said UK-founded infrastructure developer Yamna would sign an agreement with Oman to build a large-scale AI data center in Salalah, its first phase expected to exceed £1 billion ($1.3 billion) and to create more than 100 skilled jobs in the UK. UK Export Finance will also lift its financing capacity for exports to Oman to up to £7 billion.
Market context
Baxtel tracks seven facilities in Oman totaling 166 MW, the largest a 150 MW site operated by Phoenix Group, with one facility in the Muscat metro. In Salalah itself, Equinix and Omantel opened the SN1 colocation and subsea cable hub in November 2024 at 0.75 MW. State-backed O-Green plans more than 200 MW of AI-ready capacity by 2028, and Oracle launched its second OCI Dedicated Region in the country last year.
Why it matters
The Gulf AI buildout is no longer a two-country story. Oman is pairing subsea connectivity with dedicated solar and storage, and it surfaced both projects at a single state visit. One 400 MW campus would more than double the data center capacity Baxtel tracks in the country.
The next milestone is the off-take confirmation the consortium expects within weeks. A signed Crusoe commitment would make the campus bankable.
