Submer and Edgecore Join Forces to Build AI-Ready Data Centre Infrastructure Across META
Submer and Edgecore Networks have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on AI-ready data centre infrastructure opportunities across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META), bringing together data centre engineering, thermal management, power and IT integration with open, high-performance networking.
The partnership comes as the rapid growth of AI workloads is placing new demands on data centre infrastructure. Increasingly dense GPU deployments require significantly more power and generate greater thermal loads, while AI and sovereign computing initiatives are creating demand for infrastructure that can scale without compromising performance, resilience or operational efficiency.
Submer brings capabilities spanning advisory and consultancy, data centre design and build, IT integration, power infrastructure and advanced thermal management. Edgecore contributes an open networking portfolio covering AI/ML switches, data centre and optical networking, as well as disaggregated infrastructure designed for high-bandwidth and low-latency workloads.
The companies argue that these infrastructure layers can no longer be planned independently as AI deployments become more demanding. Power, cooling, compute, networking and facility design increasingly influence one another, making early-stage integration critical to the deployment of high-density AI environments.
“The AI infrastructure market is entering a new phase. Customers are no longer simply looking for individual technologies; they need infrastructure that is engineered to work together from the outset,” said Khalid Aljamed, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Submer.
“As GPU densities increase, power, thermal management, networking and facility design become fundamentally interconnected,” Aljamed added. “Our collaboration with Edgecore brings together complementary expertise to help customers approach these requirements as one coordinated infrastructure environment.”
Edgecore CEO Mingshou Liu said the increasing scale of GPU clusters is reshaping data centre networking requirements, particularly around performance and flexibility.
“Edgecore’s open networking approach provides the flexibility and performance needed for these environments,” Liu said. “By combining our networking capabilities with Submer’s expertise in advanced thermal and data centre infrastructure, we can help customers address the broader infrastructure requirements of high-density AI deployments in a more integrated way.”
Under the MoU, the companies will explore joint solution development, customer opportunities and go-to-market initiatives across META. Areas of focus will include integrated AI infrastructure design, networking and IT integration, advanced thermal management and architectures that bring networking, power, cooling and facility requirements together from the earliest stages of planning.
The companies will also pursue opportunities with enterprises, data centre operators and service providers investing in enterprise and sovereign AI infrastructure, with the aim of helping customers move from infrastructure planning and design to operational AI capacity with fewer integration challenges.
The regional opportunity is particularly significant in the Gulf, where national AI and digital transformation strategies are driving investment in high-performance computing and data centre capacity. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are emerging as major centres for sovereign AI investment, increasing demand for the physical infrastructure needed to support increasingly dense GPU environments.
For Submer, the agreement also builds on its expansion across META, including the establishment of regional operations and a Saudi Arabia headquarters. By combining its expertise in facility, power and thermal infrastructure with Edgecore’s open networking technologies, the partnership is intended to address AI infrastructure as a connected engineering challenge rather than a collection of individual technology layers.
As AI workloads continue to push data centre power, cooling and networking requirements, the collaboration reflects a broader shift in how organisations will need to design infrastructure for the next generation of computing: AI-ready capacity will increasingly depend not only on how much compute a data centre can deploy, but on how effectively every layer around that compute works together.
