Business Services
Saudi Arabia
The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) is a modern, mixed-use financial hub located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It serves as a cornerstone of Saudi Vision 2030, aiming to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy by attracting a diverse range of leading international and local businesses, fostering innovation, and creating a vibrant urban environment. KAFD offers state-of-the-art office spaces, luxury residences, retail, hospitality, and entertainment facilities - all designed with a strong focus on sustainability.
Creating the city of the future, today
To achieve its goal of providing customers with an innovative consumer experience, KAFD initiated the first phase of its Smart City Project, with the second phase scheduled for completion by the end of 2025.
First, KAFD established the foundation for its Smart City platform by developing data and middleware, which integrated datasets from district systems for monitoring purposes. KAFD aims to accelerate the data journey from the edge to the centralized platform rapidly. The ultimate goal is to move to real time instead of batching data. This ambitious initiative positions KAFD at the forefront of global smart cities by enabling it to collect, analyze and respond to data in real time to enhance its tenant and visitor experience.
KAFD’s smart city strategy is fundamentally human-centric, designed to simplify daily life, enhance accessibility, and deliver seamless experiences for residents, businesses, and visitors across the district. As part of this vision, KAFD is integrating smart home technologies within residential units, enabling residents to manage their living environments more efficiently through connected digital services.
Cloudera's platform provides KAFD with an overarching infrastructure to handle data from various sources, including middleware, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and databases. Using the information gathered from these disparate sources, KAFD can then build and implement new and beneficial use cases for residents and visitors alike. KAFD plans to introduce a total of 150 new use cases that will support the city’s daily operations, make the area safer for commuters, and enhance the ease of use for residents and visitors.
“The biggest advantage we’ve seen with Cloudera is speed - specifically, a much faster time-to-value,” said Aqeel Bafadel, VP Smart City and Innovation at KAFD DMC. “We're now able to deliver meaningful data insights twice as fast as before, enabling district-wide enhancements that create unrivaled experiences for everyone visiting, working, or residing in KAFD.”
KAFD’s Digital Twin powers smart city operations
The capacity to receive and interpret information in real time was crucial for KAFD, which utilizes Cloudera's open data lakehouse. Real-time data is fed into the data lakehouse with Cloudera Data Flow and Cloudera Streaming on-premises to create a trusted Smart City data store. As a result, KAFD gains instant insights into the status of items such as traffic signals and parking capacity in areas of the city for users.
Trust, data governance, and platform reliability are core design principles of KAFD’s smart city architecture, ensuring secure, compliant, and dependable digital services at district scale.
In addition, KAFD built a digital twin of its financial hub, with the capability to make both immediate and long-term changes to the smart city as necessary. Through the use of the digital twin, city operations utilize a virtual replica of the area to receive data on water supply and traffic situations, track geolocated social media sentiment analysis and optimize building design and city infrastructure.
KAFD is progressively expanding its digital twin, AI, and advanced analytics capabilities to support more informed decision-making and future operational optimization across the district.
The long-term goal for KAFD city officials is to utilize the city’s digital twin to leverage AI and data analytics, optimizing city operations and further enhancing the smart city experience for its customers and residents. KAFD also aims to build ML models on consolidated operational data using Cloudera AI. This will be achieved by utilizing the Cloudera AI platform to analyze information in real time, enabling instant decision-making. Ultimately, KAFD’s smart city solutions optimize the district’s planning and operations so that its visitors and tenants can spend more time doing the things they enjoy, unencumbered by the challenges and issues of a traditional city.
“We're investing in real-time analytics, edge computing, and advanced data orchestration to support dynamic service delivery,” Bafadel said. “Our goal is to create a smart city platform that’s not only intelligent and adaptive but also trustworthy and designed to evolve with the needs of our residents, businesses, and visitors.”
Through this approach, KAFD is positioning itself as a reference model for smart districts in the region, demonstrating how data-driven platforms can support sustainable urban development at scale.
This customer story was developed and published in January 2026.
