Saudi Arabia seeks to use financial might to muscle into global AI industry
Saudi Arabia’s new state-owned artificial intelligence company will seek investment from top US tech companies and will launch a $10bn venture capital fund as it leads the kingdom’s effort to become a global AI hub.
Tareq Amin, chief executive of Humain, told the Financial Times he was in talks with American groups including OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI and Andreessen Horowitz about its ambitious plans.
He said it was seeking a US tech group to become an equity partner in Humain’s data centre business, which aims to become one of the world’s biggest AI infrastructure providers, but declined to say which American companies were interested in such a deal.
“We are in discussions with all of them,” Amin said in his first interview since Humain’s launch this month. “Some of them, which you will hear about very soon, are massive names in the data centre segment.”
The 52-year-old said its VC fund, Humain Ventures, would launch this summer with an initial $10bn to spend in start-ups in the US, Europe and parts of Asia.
Humain is seeking to use Saudi Arabia’s financial might to gain a central role in almost every aspect of the burgeoning AI industry — from investing, infrastructure and chip design.
That sprawling strategy is unmatched outside a handful of US and Chinese Big Tech companies, which have had years, if not decades, to build their businesses and technical expertise.
US tech firms increasingly view Gulf states and their powerful sovereign wealth funds as critical sources of investment, with American tech executives in talks with regional officials about investments and raising capital.
Humain, which is owned and funded by the $940bn Public Investment Fund, was unveiled the day before US President Donald Trump visited Riyadh, with a host of top tech executives in tow, including Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader, chairs Humain and has tasked it with driving Riyadh’s multibillion-dollar ambitions. The AI company had already inked deals worth $23bn with US tech groups, including Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services and Qualcomm since its launch, said Amin.
Humain has a target of establishing 1.9 gigawatt of data centre capacity by 2030, rising to 6.6GW four years later — which would be among the largest global AI infrastructure projects. Amin said that, at current market rates, the project would cost $77bn.
The chief executive said Humain’s goal is, by 2030, to be processing 7 per cent of global “training”, the development of AI models and “inferencing”, the model’s responses to user requests.
“The world is hungry for capacity,” said Amin, a Jordanian-American who was previously chief executive of Aramco Digital, the tech arm 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, I think, is going to secure a good chunk of the market share.”
The establishment of Humain underscores Prince Mohammed’s ambitions in the sector as energy rich Gulf states vie to be regional AI leaders, use technology to hasten the diversification of oil-dependent economies and become “data exporters”.
Like the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia has decided to focus on working with American tech groups as it seeks to reassure US policymakers concerned about technology transfer to China, the region’s biggest trading partner.
Amin said Humain understands that its “equity partners bring more than just capital”.
“The importance of the US ecosystem is very critical,” he added. “If you go and look at our suppliers, you’ll discover that we were deliberate on the partnerships and the choices that we have picked . . . we did not want to make mistakes.”
The first phase of its plan to build huge data centre parks will begin with a 50MW plant utilising 18,000 Nvidia chips it hopes to bring online next year, with a plan to expand that to 500MW in phases, which would require about 180,000 chips, Amin said.
Musk’s “Colossus” AI cluster for xAI was built utilising 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. Meanwhile, the first US “Stargate” data centre being funded by OpenAI, Japan’s SoftBank and Oracle is expected to have 400,000 Nvidia’s GB200 chips — the latest “Superchip” for training and running AI systems.
Humain has also signed a $10bn joint venture with AMD to supply 500MW of capacity over five years, and is investing $2bn with Qualcomm to develop data centres and chip design capabilities in the kingdom.
Under the latter deal, Qualcomm will set up a chipset design centre in Riyadh that employs 500 engineers. Humain has no plans to move into chip manufacturing, however.
Amin said Humain would begin the procurement process for the chips from the US tech firms in the next 30 days, adding that he was optimistic that the sales would be supported by the Trump administration.
In recent weeks, Washington announced it was scrapping a Biden-era rule that limited the sale of AI chips to countries like Saudi Arabia, but added it would introduce a different rule as a replacement.
Addressing concerns about privacy and security at data centres, Amin said Humain would allow “real-time inventory” or allowing customers to instantly audit how information was being used and processed.
In addition, Riyadh was expected to pass legislation that would, in effect, mean data centres would be regulated under the laws of the country of origin of the tenant AI company, he said. It is unclear if this will satisfy strict “data sovereignty” rules, such as in the EU, which prevent the holding of sensitive information in overseas servers.
To lure data centres to the kingdom, Riyadh is offering subsidies on electricity prices, which are already among the lowest in the world. Humain would provide the infrastructure for joint ventures.
It is a model that has been applied for Groq, which has been building what it describes as the world’s largest inferencing data centre in the kingdom. It began as a joint venture with Aramco Digital, overseen by Amin, but will probably move to Humain as Riyadh looks to consolidate its prime AI assets within the new entity.
In February, Riyadh agreed to a $1.5bn expansion of the project in the country’s Eastern Province, where Humain has secured a lease for 2.3 square miles of land at an industrial city. The site could host 10 200MW plants, Amin said, adding that Humain planned to develop a park three times the size in Riyadh.
The plans come at a time when the government and the PIF are grappling with lower oil prices and the vast scale of their financial commitments with multiple megaprojects under way.
But AI is considered one of the areas where the kingdom will look to prioritise. Asked whether a period of lower oil prices would impact Humain’s spending plans, Amin said: “The question we should ask: can you afford as a country to miss the opportunity?”
