This is a story from Saudi Arabia to the world, about the human force driving AI. It traces how Saudi talent, leadership and ambition are turning local vision and investment into global AI impact. More than technology, this is about the people, founders, engineers, operators and partners, whose creativity, commercial savvy and ethical choices will shape whether anyone, anywhere, can own, operate and scale frontier AI without compromise, without dependency, and without wasted compute.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n What This Interview Is About<\/b><\/p>\n A conversation with Ahmed AlSharif about building Think, a Saudi-founded company creating what he calls the world\u2019s most efficient AI infrastructure. This interview explores his journey from PlayStation and Meta to founding a startup in Saudi Arabia, and how his technical breakthroughs align with the Kingdom\u2019s AI transformation. Today, The Saudi Times brings you a story from Saudi Arabia to the world. At its centre is Think, a Riyadh-based AI company on a mission to build the most efficient, highest-performing compute platform on earth, where hardware and software co-evolve to maximise intelligence. Leading that vision are Founder and CEO Ahmed AlSharif and Co-Founder and COO Ammar Enaya, whose work is taking Saudi innovation onto the global stage, from Taipei and Palo Alto to Riyadh, as they showcase the Kingdom\u2019s next generation of AI infrastructure.<\/span><\/p>\n Think – Engineering Efficiency First, with Sovereignty Built In<\/b><\/p>\n In July 2025, in a garage in Riyadh, a former Meta executive was assembling a liquid-cooled supercomputer with his own hands. The heat outside touched 45 degrees; the machine inside was engineered to barely warm the room. Ahmed AlSharif doesn’t waste time explaining why he was doing it.<\/span> That efficiency is what makes real sovereignty economically and practically viable. Think enables organisations, enterprises and governments to own, operate and scale their AI with full control and data privacy, without depending on traditional data centres or cloud providers. The company was founded by games-industry veteran Ahmed AlSharif (formerly PlayStation, EA and Meta); seasoned technology leader Ammar Enaya (formerly Cisco, HPE Aruba and Vectra AI) joined him as Co-Founder and COO.<\/span><\/p>\n “My success is not my own doing,” he says early in our conversation. “It comes from God.” Ahmed told The Saudi Times<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n His humility is striking given his r\u00e9sum\u00e9: PlayStation 4, Oculus Quest 2, Meta\u2019s Orion AI glasses, Need for Speed and more. It began in Oxford, where his parents, microbiologist PhD researchers at Oxford University and later the United Nations, raised a boy who started taking apart computers at age nine.<\/span><\/p>\n “My father nurtured my curiosity. Threw me computer books and magazines. By eleven I was in repair shops. I got fired from the first one, as I broke more than I fixed. The next job, I learned my lesson. Eric, whom my father introduced me to, moved me into micro-components, software and controllers. I was super young.” – he shared with The Saudi Times.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The through-line is visible: early hardware intimacy, a computer science degree, then the games industry not to play but to build at the bleeding edge. “I joined to make things better. Graphics, AI, Animation, mass-networked systems” he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Ahmed and The PlayStation Education<\/b><\/p>\n Sony recruited him early in his career. “The PlayStation 3,” he notes, “was the strongest pure\u2011hardware console of its generation, but it failed commercially because it was very difficult to make games for.” That lesson stuck. At PlayStation, AlSharif worked on the PS4 platform SDK, OS system components, graphics rendering libraries and the GPU\/CPU profilers, tooling relied on by every licensed studio on a platform that shipped over 100 million consoles. He also helped develop the PlayStation VR headset, authoring the earliest known VR automation platform on PSVR hardware. It was at PlayStation that he first discovered how much performance can hide between silicon and software. A question he never stopped asking.<\/span> EA and the Art of Shipping<\/b><\/p>\n Electronic Arts brought him in as Technical Director across its North Sea group: Criterion Games in the UK and Ghost Games in Gothenburg, Sweden, the home studios of the Need for Speed franchise, with over 150 million copies sold. He supported engineering to ship Need for Speed: Heat, Ghost\u2019s final title, supported DICE teams on Battlefield V, and laid the technical foundation for Need for Speed: Unbound at Criterion. He led distributed engineering teams across the UK and Sweden, and credits his mentors for shaping his approach.<\/span> This became his model: combined CEO, CTO, and engineer.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “I learned to try to foresee value quickly. I don’t have to rely on technical translation. It’s been core to my success, by the grace of God, I understand my area and explore direction without outsourcing the thinking behind it,” he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Meta and the AR\/VR Bet<\/b><\/p>\n Then came Meta. As Head of Reality Labs Automation and Platform Engineering, AlSharif led the developer ecosystem and platform infrastructure across Meta\u2019s AR, VR and XR portfolio, which heavily relied on various ML functionality for hand and face tracking, object detection, boundary detection, and more. The Quest 2 and Smart AI Glasses, arguably Meta\u2019s most advanced AR hardware, emerged during this period. The Quest 2 later became the best-selling VR headset in history. He led the platform and infrastructure decisions and pinpointed where bottlenecks formed and waste accumulated: world-class compute with many layers of software on top. Ahmed spent years building and running some of the best infrastructure on earth, and the pattern he remembers most is how difficult it was to ensure it never sat idle. A challenge he took personally.<\/span><\/p>\n The Sandsoft Interlude<\/b><\/p>\n In 2023, Ahmed AlSharif took on a different challenge: the MENA market. As CTO of Sandsoft Inc., he built the product and engineering organization in under two years. Stood up development studios in Riyadh and Barcelona, helped multiply revenue across a six-title portfolio, and cut release cycles in half through an in-house publishing platform. Sony, EA and Meta had taught him how to run world class engineering and global organizations. Sandsoft taught him how to build one from scratch.<\/span><\/p>\n “I saw his talent from far away,” he says of what came next.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Ammar Enaya and the Complement<\/b><\/p>\n The Think story has one founder and two leads. AlSharif originated the company and handles the architecture. Ammar Enaya, who joined as Co-Founder and COO in October 2025, handles the doors.<\/span><\/p>\n Bringing years of experience in commercial strategy, enterprise technology and business development, Enaya has built a career around taking innovative technologies to market. His expertise in forging strategic partnerships and scaling businesses complements AlSharif’s technical leadership, providing Think with the commercial foundation to match its engineering ambitions.<\/span><\/p>\n “Ammar is the go-to-market genius. He opens doors, gets us access to the right teams and people. As the prior CEO of Ajlan Tech, he has a strong background with large companies. Extremely focused, commercially astute. He helped me take products to market. We collaborated in scaling together”. Ahmed shared with The Saudi Times.<\/span><\/p>\n The dynamic is deliberate. “I like problem-solving. I enjoy scaling things. While Ammar is the guy who takes those solutions and makes them reality. I knew he would complement me very well.”<\/span><\/p>\n Ahmed and The Silicon Valley Exit<\/b><\/p>\n The move to Saudi Arabia was not obvious. AlSharif spent nearly twenty years in tech’s center of gravity, between London and Silicon Valley. He had spent those years building and maintaining other nations\u2019 advantages to their benefits.<\/span><\/p>\n “One cold night in my home in Seattle, I realized something. There is a surplus of world-class talent across the Muslim world, yet most are forced to go elsewhere because of a distinct lack of opportunity to work on true bleeding edge technology. Self-inflicted brain drain. No tech giant has emerged from this region. Careem was bought by Uber. There are many missed opportunities in our generations.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The personal calculus was specific. His family, bedouins from Mecca, his mother from Rome, gave him roots in the region. But the decision required more than heritage. It required a support structure and government willing to invest because big success comes from big investment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “In my heart I want to put the Muslim world on the map. To re-ignite a golden age of engineering. To make us leaders, not followers. Actually building world class IP and innovation.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The move to Saudi Arabia three years ago – The Think Thesis<\/b><\/p>\n By early 2025, AlSharif had seen enough. The idea that became Think took shape: the architecture concept and technical design matured from May, and by July serious prototyping was underway in AlSharif\u2019s garage in Riyadh. By October he had left Sandsoft to build the company full-time. The premise is direct: current AI infrastructure is inefficient by design. Generic hardware and generic software ensures compatibility but creates fragmentation and waste across the stack. The prevailing wisdom, that any problem can be solved by throwing money at it, hits physical limits. Data centers, energy constraints, delivery timelines. Even with an unlimited budget, the infrastructure cannot scale fast enough.<\/span><\/p>\n “<\/span>We knew this problem was growing. An era of doing more with less, of being more efficient with what you already have, had to begin.<\/span><\/i>” Ahmed told The Saudi Times<\/span><\/p>\n In that garage, AlSharif wrote the very initial versions of the bare-metal orchestration software and designed the hardware for the first SuperNode prototype himself. That work defined how Think attacks the efficiency problem from both sides of the stack: ultra-dense, thermally efficient liquid-cooled compute nodes engineered in symbiosis with ILM, a proprietary hardware-aware orchestration platform that knows what every chip, every thermal envelope and every watt can deliver. ILM runs training, fine-tuning and inference on the same nodes, scheduled dynamically, so silicon never sits idle. Every chip runs cooler, lasts longer, and earns its depreciation instead of sitting idle. Transforming compute into an efficient, owned, practical asset, not a cost that compounds. The implications are significant: cost barriers drop, sovereignty becomes practical and economically achievable, and organizations can run AI without shipping their data to unknown locations.<\/span><\/p>\n “Your data is the model. You train the model and your data becomes embedded in the weights, and whoever runs that model holds your knowledge. But that is only half the problem. The other half is what AI costs to stand up: the GPUs, accelerators, the datacentre, the cooling, the specialists, the months before anything runs. Think deletes that overhead. We compressed all of it into a node you plug in and own. Everything runs on it, concurrently, and the silicon never sits idle “<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n A growing portfolio of patent filings protects the architecture, including its self-contained cooling system that addresses the thermal and footprint efficiency problem. In production benchmark testing, the platform sustained GPU utilisation above 90 percent, against an industry norm of 30 to 50 percent, at roughly a tenth of average frontier cloud costs per token, AlSharif emphasizes. \u201cIt is on the field and operational.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Vision 2030 and the Infrastructure Play<\/b><\/p>\n Think is not simply a vendor. It is a capability builder. The distinction matters in a Kingdom positioning itself as a global AI player. The market agrees: in 2026 Think closed the largest AI infrastructure pre-seed round in MENA history, backed by RAED Ventures, Aramco’s Wa’ed Ventures, and Dhahran Techno Valley.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “The way I was raised, you let the work speak. In tech that means: if you provide real value and solve a genuine problem, your product sells itself. It gets recognized automatically.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The Saudi Times asked Ahmed about Think and its structural alignment with Vision 2030.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “AI infrastructure represents hundreds of billions, potentially trillions in value. Diversification of GDP depends on exactly this kind of capability. Compute sovereignty, cost efficiency, and high performance are not features; they are prerequisites. At Think we built a new category of AI infrastructure with efficiency at its root, and everything else, sovereignty, performance, cost control, grows from it” <\/span><\/i>This, he argues, is what gives industries and nations their edge: the full capability of AI, with minimal overhead. He told The Saudi Times.<\/span><\/p>\n The Founder-CEO Balance<\/b><\/p>\n AlSharif’s management philosophy is shaped by contrast. Large corporations pay to learn expensive lessons and gain market insight; startups cannot afford to play by the same rules, a mistake he sees often in start-up ecosystems.<\/span><\/p>\n “Big tech companies invest billions to grow and survive. They have reliable income, so they can afford expensive lessons. And being part of that continual growth and R&D process, you learn what to do and what not to do,” <\/span><\/i>he said.<\/span> The startup advantage is speed. <\/span>“Your biggest asset is agility. Big corporations may have money and manpower, but coordination and direction takes time. As a startup, if you find a problem, you can address it, build and deploy the solution, and compound innovation cycles faster.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The discipline is holding both at once: big-tech best practices without the bureaucracy, startup freedom without repeating big-tech mistakes. Get that balance right, he says, and the advantage maximizes. <\/span>“Once you find that edge, it becomes a race, one we intend to stay ahead of.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The Regional Ambition<\/b><\/p>\n “<\/span>Talent and people are critical. As AI becomes more embedded, what keeps us ahead is the ability to think, to recognize, to predict. Throughout history, humans have always been augmented by the technology and tools we build. So it is easy to get stuck in the mindset that we can never do better than the giants of our industry, but that mindset is counter to our faith, to our own history. We must hold ourselves to greater ambitions than those who came before us. To be better. To do more, with or without AI.<\/span><\/i>” Ahmed told The Saudi Times<\/span><\/p>\n He reaches deeper. <\/span>“We all know the long history of this region. The past two hundred years are the exception, not the rule. There is a reason this region wrote one of the largest chapters in the story of human knowledge. Mathematics. Astronomy. Medicine. Chemistry. Mechanics. Optics. This region did not watch these developments happen, it produced them.”<\/span><\/i> The values needed, he suggests, are already present. <\/span>“It is simple. Put in the work. Put aside thoughts about title or wealth. Prioritize impact, prioritize making a difference. Those values produce innovation, by the permission of God. This does not just align with our values as Muslims, they originate from being Muslim.”<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n The regions chapters in history are wider still, philosophy, theology, law, pharmacology, but it is the lineage of inventors and scientists that Think claims: it is no accident the company’s mission closes with a promise to ignite a new golden age of engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n The Invitation<\/b><\/p>\n Think is currently hiring. AlSharif is explicit about what he wants. “If my message resonates with anyone out there, who works on the bleeding edge of their industry and wants to be part of something meaningful, reach out. We are looking for the brightest to join this journey.”<\/span><\/p>\n He pauses. “Fundamentally excited to share more, inshallah.”<\/span><\/p>\n Why watch him in 2026<\/b><\/p>\n Ahmed AlSharif is a rare combination: the technical depth to architect what does not yet exist, and the conviction to build it where it matters most. In him, the Kingdom’s bet on human capital finds its proof. Saudi Arabia is not merely investing in infrastructure, it is cultivating the talent that turns capital into capability. AlSharif’s journey from Oxford repair shops to founding an AI infrastructure company in Riyadh is the story future generations of Saudi leaders will benchmark: that purpose, integrity, and relentless execution can reshape an industry and serve humanity at scale. As the Kingdom continues its heavy investment in talent, technology, and the human force behind it, AlSharif stands as living evidence that the vision is real. <\/span>Stay tuned for exclusive news coming soon, at LEAP Saudi Arabia, he promised exciting developments. The world will be watching.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Meet the Founder Building AI Infrastructure that Thinks The Saudi Times Presents the Global AI tech CEOs to Watch for 2026 By: Boudou Gueffai | Editor-in-Chief Editorial contribution: Jude Albuthi Meet the team behind Think and its unified AI supercompute ecosystem: Founder and CEO Ahmed AlSharif, and Co-Founder and COO Ammar Enaya. AlSharif originated the company, architects the product, the systems, hardware and software at its core, while Enaya, who joined in October 2025 is the deal-maker and operational owner, who opens doors to markets, governments and partners. He was CEO of Ajlan Tech and brings experience from large companies,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":58651,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[228,11194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Ahmed](\"https:\/\/thesauditimes.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2-Ahmed-AlSharif-And-Ammar-Enaya-During-Think_s-COMPUTEX-Taipei-Debut.jpg\")
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\n<\/span>After nearly two decades building and shipping hardware and software used by billions, he\u2019s building the AI infrastructure he believes should have existed from the start. Think is built around a single obsession: efficiency. Idle silicon, he argues, is AI\u2019s most expensive invisible cost, a line item that appears on no budget. Most deployed silicon delivers a fraction of what it could. Think\u2019s answer engineers ultra-dense, thermally-efficient liquid-cooled compute nodes in symbiosis with intelligent bare-metal orchestration software to attack today\u2019s critical bottlenecks in AI deployments across cooling, power efficiency and compute utilisation, so that anyone can own, operate and scale frontier AI without compromise, without dependency, and without wasted compute.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Ahmed](\"https:\/\/thesauditimes.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Ahmed-AlSharif-Founder-and-CEO-of-Think-Engineering-the-Worlds-Most-Efficient-AI-Infrastructure-Turning-Every-Watt-of-Silicon-into-Intelligence33-1.jpeg\")
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\n<\/span>He then ventured into mass-transit infrastructure at Vix Technology, where he led EMEA engineering behind the mass-transit automated fare clearing and ticketing platform underpinning networks in Sydney, Beijing, Bangkok, Dallas (DART) and Brussels (STIB) to this day, clearing millions of passenger journeys daily. \u201cCritical infra development,\u201d he calls it. \u201cNo tolerance for error.\u201d He learned, sometimes the hard way, what it takes to ship infrastructure that cannot fail.<\/span><\/p>\n
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\n<\/b>“David King and Marija Radulovic-Nastic from EA, Tom Gibbons from Vix, Senthil Kumaran at Meta, they all mentored me throughout my career, each taught me their own dimensions. The best leaders adapt and have technical depth in their areas. Deep understanding, paired with strong commercial instincts too. They can make decisions quickly because they know the terrain no matter how senior they become” <\/span><\/i>he explained to The Saudi Times.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Ahmed](\"https:\/\/thesauditimes.net\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Ahmed-AlSharif-Founder-and-CEO-of-Think-Engineering-the-Worlds-Most-Efficient-AI-Infrastructure-Turning-Every-Watt-of-Silicon-into-Intelligence33-2.jpeg\")
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