Saudi Arabia is playing one of the most ambitious games in global technology history with the aim of becoming the world’s third-largest artificial intelligence (AI) market after the United States and China.
Through Humain, a state-backed AI company and a subsidiary of the country’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), the Kingdom is attempting to transform and turn its oil-dependent economy into a digital powerhouse particularly powered by AI and computing infrastructure.
Humain is part of Project Transcendence, a $100 billion initiative that’s also a key part of the broader Kingdom’s Vision 2030, a project aimed at transforming the country into a global AI leader.
The staggering scope and financial backing of this project represents one of the most remarkable government investments in AI globally, as it is not only limited to AI alone; it cuts across supporting startups and talent development, building massive tech infrastructure, and funding research across the entire tech sector.
More importantly, it signals that Saudi Arabia has initiated economic diversification in the sense that the Kingdom has moved beyond pouring money into oil and other concrete capital deployment.
Currently, Humain serves as the operational engine for the Kingdom’s AI aspirations, as it will be managing everything from data center development to cloud services, large language models (LLMs), and AI workforce training.
The company specifically aims to build and handle up to 6 gigawatts in data center capacity, with the likes of tech giants including Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Qualcomm, and Cisco as partners. Humain’s partnerships with these leading tech companies were formed at its launch back in May.
Saudi Arabia has also committed over $70 billion towards massive data center projects that are expected to build gigawatts of computing power by 2027. An example is the $5 billion NEOM-DataVolt sustainable AI data center, a partnership that aims to build the region’s first “net-zero, sustainable AI factory campus” in Oxagon, a planned futuristic city within Saudi Arabia.
This project is known to prioritize smart, green technology, something Tareq Amin, the CEO of Humain calls an “advantage.”
“Look at this country’s amazing energy grid that doesn’t require a company like Humain to build the substations and the power to deliver that to a data center. That means I have saved 18 months of time,” Amin told CNN.
Humain As A Reflection of Saudi Arabia’s AI Startup Ecosystem
At the 9th edition of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) that took place at Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, Humain secured a $3 billion deal with Blackstone-backed Airtrunk to build “state-of-the-art data centers” in the Kingdom.
For Humain’s Amin, the partnership will specifically accelerate “Saudi Arabia’s technological advancement,” as well as “establish a platform for long-term economic diversification and global competitiveness.”
For Airtrunk, who is one of the leading hyperscale data center specialist in the Asia-Pacific & Middle East (APME) region, it means “bringing together the whole digital ecosystem, combining Humain’s end-to-end AI capabilities, from infrastructure to models, with AirTrunk’s leading hyperscale data center capabilities,” Robin Khuda, Founder and CEO of AirTrunk said.
The Kingdom-backed startup also launched Humain One, an AI-powered enterprise operating system that lets users interact with it via conversational language. It is also capable of automating HR, finance, legal, operational, and IT workflows, with Amin attesting to CNN that Humain only had one employee in its payroll as the AI handles the rest.
Challenges That Lay Ahead
Despite the massive capital inflow and infrastructure, Saudi Arabia and the kingdom-backed Humain faces its greatest challenge in building and training AI talent.
For instance, the Kingdom’s National Strategy for Data and AI has set aggressive training goals, aiming to produce thousands of AI specialists and scientists by the end of the decade. However, recent reports indicate a skills gap where the demand for AI talent outweighs local supply, in which is now being filled up by foreign experts.
This talent gap remains a key challenge, as human capital ultimately directs and informs how infrastructure and investments effectively deliver AI leadership.
Additionally, there is brewing competition in the region, especially with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) who have made significant moves to enter the AI arms race.
A prolific example is the Stargate UAE, the first international deployment of OpenAI’s Stargate project and a further partnership between OpenAI, G42, Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco to build a large-scale AI data center in the UAE.
However, Amin doesn’t see this as a competition that will cause a pause in the strides both countries have made so far.
In response to being asked “whether there’s room for two regional heavyweights,” Amin responded with, “It is good for humanity to have knowledge – especially around AI – not to be all centralized in one location. So it’s good what is happening in the UAE. It’s very good what’s happening in Saudi Arabia.”
“I will tell you what we decided to do, which is very different… Humane is not a holding company. We are an operating company,” Amin added.
