Nokia's Roque Lozano on the Infrastructure Behind Saudi Arabia's AI Economy

At LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, the technology industry's attention moved past the models and applications that dominate AI coverage and toward the layer beneath them: data centers, AI factories and the networks joining the two.

Roque Lozano, Senior Vice President for Network Infrastructure in the Middle East and Africa at Nokia, spoke with Entrepreneur Middle East at the event about where Saudi Arabia sits in that build-out. His read centers on the scale of the Kingdom's investment in compute facilities and in the connectivity that gives them value.

A token economy, generated by machines

Lozano points to the rise of what he calls a token economy. The idea concerns who produces internet traffic. An expanding share of it may no longer come from people typing, streaming or clicking, but from machines, bots and AI agents acting on their own behalf.

That distinction carries weight for a country assembling AI capacity. When traffic originates with software rather than users, value shifts toward whoever owns the compute and the pipes. Lozano frames Saudi Arabia's position as a chance to move past being a consumer of AI and toward producing and exporting AI-driven content.

Producing AI content means hosting the computation behind it. Hosting computation means moving large volumes of data between sites, which puts heavier pressure on the networks in between.

AI factories, the term that has settled on facilities built for training and running models, sit at the center of that spending. They draw power and bandwidth at a scale older data center designs were never meant to carry, which is why the networking and transmission layers attract as much scrutiny as the chips inside them.

Interconnection work and an early bet on 6G

Nokia is working on Saudi Arabia's data center interconnection network. Linking facilities matters because AI workloads rarely stay inside a single building. Training and inference both depend on shuttling data between clusters that can sit far apart.

Lozano also expects the Gulf to be an early adopter of 6G. The generational jump matters less for raw speed than for what the network can do on its own: sensing conditions, adapting to them and operating with growing autonomy.

Early 6G adoption would reach beyond handset performance. A network that senses and adapts becomes part of the machinery AI systems run on, rather than a pipe that merely carries their output.

Together, the two strands describe a change in what is being built. Data centers supply the computation. Interconnection and next-generation mobile networks determine how freely that computation can be reached, shared and put to work.

The argument Lozano makes at LEAP is that the contest over AI will be settled as much by infrastructure as by model quality. For Saudi Arabia, the test will be how much of the AI economy ends up running on hardware and networks inside the country, rather than simply passing through it.