On May 12, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled a significant step in its technological evolution with the launch of “Humain,” a state-backed artificial intelligence company, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF).
Saudi Arabia is currently in the process of its economic diversification goals through its Vision 2030, as the country is working towards reducing reliance on its oil sector. Its new project, “Humain,” is one of its major projects in its Vision 2030 goals to position Saudi Arabia as a global leader in AI innovation and infrastructure.
Humain is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and has the backing of the PIF, valued at $940 billion. It is headquartered in Riyadh and charged with developing cutting-edge AI technology and infrastructure.
The launch took place during the Saudi-US investment forum in Riyadh, which was attended by US President Donald Trump as part of his first bilateral overseas trip of his second term.
Also present during the forum were tech elites like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, xAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Google’s Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat, Blackstones’ Stephen Schwarzam, and White House AI czar David Sacks.
During the launch, Humain secured significant partnerships with a number of leading American technology companies present during the launch.
One of the biggest deals at the launch was with Nvidia, which came to an agreement with Humain to sell hundreds of thousands of AI chips to Saudi Arabia, with its first supply of 18,000 units of its latest Blackwell GPUs.
According to Reuters, both companies said in a joint statement that they will build up to 500 megawatts of capacity that will include “several hundred thousand” of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs for the next five years.
Humain also made a deal with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices Inc.), one of the top rivals to Nvidia. AMD is set to invest up to $10 billion to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity for the next five years.
In a press release by AMD following its agreement with Humain, it states that the infrastructure would be the “world’s most open, scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient AI infrastructure that will power the future of AI infrastructure through a network of AMD-based AI computing centers stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States.”
To this, Lisa Su, CEO at AMD, said, “Our investment with Humain is an important milestone in advancing global AI infrastructure. Together, we are building a globally significant AI platform that delivers performance, openness, and reach at unprecedented levels.”
Amazon is not losing out on the action either, as the company plans to bring data centers worth over $5 billion to Saudi Arabia to build an “AI Zone.” Google also announced on the 13th of May, via a press release, its intent to back up Saudi Technology Ventures’ (STV) new AI fund, dedicated to supporting AI start-ups native to the region.
During the launch, Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, said, “This is not just another infrastructure play; it’s an open invitation to the world’s innovators. We are democratizing AI at the compute level, ensuring that access to advanced AI is limited only by imagination, not infrastructure.”
Once fully operational, the company will be offering next-gen data centers, cloud computing services, and the development of advanced AI models, which would be among the world’s most powerful Arabic large language models (LLMs).
