Saudi Arabia Enters The AI Industry

Saudi Arabia has launched an ambitious bid to position itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence, deploying billions of dollars from its sovereign wealth fund to build vast infrastructure, fund international start-ups, and secure partnerships with major US tech players.

At the centre of this push is Humain, a new state-owned AI company backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The company’s chief executive, Tareq Amin, told the Financial Times he is in discussions with the likes of OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as part of a plan to create one of the world’s most advanced AI ecosystems.

Humain intends to launch a $10bn venture capital arm this summer to invest in AI start-ups across the US, Europe, and Asia. At the same time, the company is courting US technology groups to become equity partners in its data centre business, which aims to process a significant portion of the world’s AI workloads by the end of the decade.

Global ambitions, American partners

The scope of Saudi Arabia’s strategy is unusually broad, spanning venture investment, chip design, infrastructure, and cloud computing. Few players outside the US and China have attempted such a wide-ranging approach.

“The world is hungry for capacity,” said Amin, a Jordanian-American executive who previously led Aramco Digital, the tech subsidiary of the Saudi state oil company. “There are two paths you could take: you take it slow, and we are definitely not taking it slow, or you go fast. Whoever reaches the end line first is going to secure a good chunk of the market share.”

Humain’s most urgent goal is to establish 1.9 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2030, rising to 6.6GW by 2034. If delivered, the infrastructure would rank among the largest globally. Amin estimated the total cost of the buildout at around $77bn, based on current market conditions.

The company has already signed $23bn worth of agreements with major US tech firms, including Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services, and Qualcomm. It also plans to begin chip procurement within 30 days, following a recent decision by the Trump administration to lift Biden-era restrictions on the export of advanced AI chips to the kingdom.

From desert to data hub

The first leg of Humain’s infrastructure plan involves a 50MW facility powered by 18,000 Nvidia GPUs, which it hopes to bring online next year. That is intended to scale up to 500MW in phases, eventually requiring around 180,000 GPUs, comparable in scale to Elon Musk’s own “Colossus” cluster for xAI.

By 2030, Amin said Humain aims to handle around 7 per cent of global AI training and inferencing capacity. “We understand that our equity partners bring more than just capital,” he said. “The importance of the US ecosystem is very critical.”

Saudi Arabia’s leadership believes that global data and compute capacity will become as strategically vital as oil once was. Humain’s model, offering subsidised infrastructure in exchange for long-term partnerships, mirrors the joint-venture template long used by state oil and petrochemical firms.

The project’s flagship site in the Eastern Province, developed jointly with chipmaker Groq, is now being consolidated under Humain. It will expand to host up to 10 individual 200MW plants on a 2.3-square-mile site. A larger, triple-sized site is planned near Riyadh.

Chips, not fabs

While Humain will not manufacture chips itself, it is investing heavily in design capabilities. The group has formed a $10bn joint venture with AMD to deliver 500MW of compute capacity over five years and is committing $2bn alongside Qualcomm to develop advanced chip design services in the kingdom.

Under the Qualcomm agreement, a new design centre in Riyadh will employ around 500 engineers. This marks a significant step for Saudi Arabia, which is attempting to build an indigenous tech workforce even as it relies heavily on imported expertise.

To address concerns over data sovereignty and compliance, Amin said Humain would offer clients “real-time inventory” of data usage, enabling tenants to audit how their data is processed. Future legislation may allow data centres in Saudi Arabia to operate under the laws of the home countries of their corporate clients, though it remains unclear whether this would meet strict EU or Asian standards.

Trump’s visit and shifting alliances

Humain was officially launched the day before US President Donald Trump visited Riyadh, accompanied by top Silicon Valley executives including Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. The timing underlined the extent to which the Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia in particular, are positioning themselves as indispensable financial backers to American tech ambitions.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds are increasingly seen by US start-ups as a critical source of capital amid rising interest rates and domestic funding constraints. Saudi Arabia’s PIF, with nearly $1tn in assets, is spearheading that trend.

Crown Prince Mohammed has made AI central to his wider economic diversification agenda. With oil revenues fluctuating and multiple megaprojects already stretching the PIF’s balance sheet, Riyadh is betting that early leadership in AI could give it long-term leverage in the global digital economy.

Asked whether lower oil prices might hinder funding for Humain’s mega-plans, Amin responded: “The question we should ask is, can you afford as a country to miss the opportunity?”

Strategic tightrope

Despite the fanfare, Humain’s trajectory depends on several delicate variables: the continued openness of US tech firms to Gulf partnerships, regulatory clarity on chip exports, and the appetite of global AI developers to base their operations in a country still navigating data laws and human rights scrutiny.

Riyadh is trying to reassure Washington by focusing its partnerships on American firms, rather than Chinese suppliers. That calculus reflects growing geopolitical sensitivity in Washington over dual-use technology, especially when it comes to chip design and data processing.

Electricity subsidies, already among the most generous in the world, are being used to lure tenants to Saudi-based infrastructure. But building true ecosystem depth will require more than tax breaks and hardware. Analysts say success will hinge on Saudi Arabia’s ability to foster homegrown talent and nurture long-term trust from the international technology community.

For now, Humain is charging ahead flush with capital, rich in ambition, and certain that the global race for AI dominance will be won not just by algorithms, but by those who build and fund the machinery behind them.