---
title: "KAUST opens as Saudi Arabia's graduate research university"
url: "https://cicadaconsultancy.online/en/news/kaust-opens-2009"
language: "en"
event_date: "2009-09-23"
published: "2026-10-03"
last_verified: "2026-10-03"
category: "AI"
publisher: "Cicada (cicadaconsultancy.online)"
license: "CC BY 4.0"
---

# KAUST opens as Saudi Arabia's graduate research university

- Event date: 23 September 2009 (2009-09-23)
- Topic: AI
- In this story: KAUST
- URL: https://cicadaconsultancy.online/en/news/kaust-opens-2009

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) was established and inaugurated on 23 September 2009 at Thuwal on the Red Sea coast, the Kingdom's first mixed-gender university campus. It opened with a reported endowment of about $10 billion and operates the Shaheen supercomputer, once the fastest in the Middle East. KAUST has since become the Kingdom's main research base for computing and AI, and in 2024 it added Centers of Excellence, including one on generative AI.

## Key figures

- initial endowment: $10 bn

## Sources

1. [King Abdullah University of Science and Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Science_and_Technology) — Wikipedia
2. [King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)](https://saudipedia.com/en/king-abdullah-university-of-science-and-technology-kaust) — Saudipedia

Archive report. Written in 2026 from contemporary sources and dated to the day the event happened.

---

Cicada · The signal in Saudi AI.
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) · Full archive for language models: https://cicadaconsultancy.online/llms-full.txt