Editorial Team
6 min read
Oman and UK-founded Yamna have agreed to cooperate on a Salalah AI data centre whose first phase is expected to exceed £1 billion. The developer brings a hydrogen-project foothold and an earlier Brazilian data-centre proposal, but financing, customers and delivery dates remain undisclosed in the announcements.
Oman has signed a cooperation memorandum with Yamna, a UK-founded infrastructure developer backed by British investment funds, for an AI data centre in Salalah whose first phase is expected to exceed £1 billion. The proposal extends Yamna’s move from green hydrogen into digital infrastructure, with commercial commitments still to be demonstrated.
The UK government projects first-phase investment above £1bn and over 100 highly skilled jobs in Britain. Graphic: Magica. Source: UK Government.
The UK government’s October 21 announcement put expected first-phase investment above £1 billion. It forecast more than 100 highly skilled jobs in Britain through the export of British expertise and returns for UK-backed investors. Those are projected benefits, and the jobs figure refers to Britain rather than employment at the Omani campus.
Oman’s Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology and Yamna signed a memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation, according to the account citing Oman’s news agency published on October 22. That updates the British announcement, which described the signing as forthcoming.
Neither account specifies the campus’s computing capacity, financing structure, customers or construction timetable. The headline investment expectation therefore cannot yet establish how much usable AI capacity will be delivered, or when. The roughly $1.3 billion figure in a subsequent report on the framework describes the same Salalah proposal, rather than additional funding.
The April 2024 green-ammonia agreement ceremony involving Hydrom, EDF, J-POWER and Yamna. This energy development is separate from the proposed AI campus. Photo: Yamna. Source: Yamna.
Yamna’s relevant record in Oman begins before this AI agreement. In an April 29, 2024 announcement, the company said its consortium with French electricity group EDF and Japanese power generator J-POWER had won a land block in Dhofar through a competitive hydrogen tender run by state-owned Hydrogen Oman, or Hydrom, which allocates land and coordinates Oman’s green-hydrogen sector.
The agreements granted the consortium exclusive rights to develop, build, own, operate and maintain the green-ammonia project for 47 years. The planned output was 1 million tonnes of ammonia annually. The partners intended to install about 4.5 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity, battery storage and a roughly 2.5-gigawatt electrolyser to produce hydrogen for an ammonia plant in the Salalah Free Zone. These were development plans, with detailed studies still to follow in that announcement.
Yamna described itself at the time as a green-hydrogen and derivatives platform financially backed by HYCAP, a UK-based private equity fund manager dedicated to hydrogen. That establishes an energy-development background and a funding relationship. EDF and J-POWER’s participation in the ammonia consortium does not establish their participation in the AI project.
The October 26 report describes the new Salalah Al Khadra Digital proposal as a power-and-compute campus linked to Yamna’s existing Salalah Al Khadra Hydrogen development. The connection gives the digital proposal an identifiable local development base. But the hydrogen award concerns a separate industrial project: its land rights and proposed energy infrastructure should not be read as confirmation that electricity is already available for the data centre.
Salalah is part of a wider digital expansion. Yamna said in a September 2, 2026 announcement that it had reserved 20 hectares at Brazil’s Port of Açu for a proposed hyperscale and AI-ready campus with an initial 250-megawatt phase. The company said that project also built on relationships established through its green-hydrogen work. This is a record of originating data-centre developments, rather than evidence of an operating AI-campus portfolio.
Past Omani investment in Britain and planned financing capacity for UK exports describe the wider bilateral relationship; neither figure is allocated to Yamna’s campus. Graphic: Magica. Source: UK Government.
Announced during the Omani ruler’s state visit to Britain, the agreement sits within a broader investment relationship. The British government says the UK–Oman Sovereign Investment Partnership began in 2022 and Oman has invested £1.7 billion in Britain since its creation. The new bilateral agreement is intended to accelerate investment in sectors including renewable energy, technology and critical minerals.
UK Export Finance, Britain’s export credit agency, also plans to increase financing capacity for British exports to Oman to as much as £7 billion. That is export-financing capacity across the relationship; the announcement does not allocate that sum to Yamna’s campus. For Britain, the stated commercial benefits include selling expertise and generating investor returns, alongside the diplomatic partnership.
Yamna is also entering a market with another large proposal. The October 26 report describes a separate $3 billion, 400-megawatt AI data centre announced by a consortium led by Mubbadrah Investment, an Omani conglomerate founded in Muscat in 2005 with investments spanning energy, mining, real estate, healthcare and IT. The report identifies digital infrastructure as a new business for the group.
The report says UK sustainable-finance firm Sustopia Capital, which claims a 5-gigawatt data-centre platform spanning Denmark, the US and the UK, would provide financing, US construction specialist Vela Tech would build the facility, and O2 Global Energy would develop 400 megawatts of co-located solar generation with battery storage. These are proposed responsibilities, rather than evidence of a completed financing or power supply.
That consortium expected a formal capacity-purchase agreement in the coming weeks after US AI-compute company Crusoe, backed by Abu Dhabi investor Mubadala, signalled interest. The report identifies Crusoe as lead developer of OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, giving the prospective buyer a relevant infrastructure record. Its interest remains short of a signed customer commitment.
The investment totals also have different scopes. Mubbadrah’s chief executive and co-founder Yasser al Barami said the $3 billion would cover buildings, electricity infrastructure, cooling and network connections, while customers would typically supply servers and specialised chips, according to an October 26 account of his explanation. Yamna’s announcements provide no equivalent spending breakdown or megawatt figure. They therefore cannot support a comparison of cost per megawatt or the amount of AI computing equipment funded.
The October 26 regional report also relays industry experts’ assessment that prolonged insecurity could make international developers more selective about Gulf exposure, even as construction on existing Saudi and UAE projects continued despite supply-chain disruption. That distinguishes progress on projects already under way from the willingness to make new commitments.
The next consequential disclosures are committed capital, a power-supply arrangement, computing capacity, customer contracts and a delivery schedule. Power prices and the scope of equipment supplied would also be needed to assess the service’s economics. A hydrogen-development award and a headline investment expectation cannot answer those questions.
For Yamna, those commitments would show whether its energy-development relationships can support a commercially viable computing service in Salalah.
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