Saudi’s Humain to Open Data Centers With US Chips in Early 2026
By Christine Burke
August 25, 2025 at 1:27 PM EDT
Saudi Arabia’s new artificial intelligence company, Humain, has broken ground on its first data centers in the kingdom and plans to have them up and running in early 2026 with the use of semiconductors imported from the US.
Locations in the capital of Riyadh and the Eastern Province’s Dammam are expected to launch in the second quarter, with an initial capacity of as much as 100 megawatts each, according to Chief Executive Officer Tareq Amin.
Humain is in the process of procuring semiconductors for those data centers from US chipmakers, including Nvidia Corp., Amin said. The Saudi company has received local regulatory approval to purchase 18,000 of Nvidia’s latest AI chips, he added.
“It depends on the governance and the protocols and the approval of the US government, and these are formalities that we are going to start going through very, very soon,” Amin said in an interview on Monday on the sidelines of an event to mark the launch of Humain’s Arabic chatbot.
While Amin declined to offer a specific timeline, the comments indicate Saudi Arabia is pressing ahead with imports of AI chips. A visit by President Donald Trump in May cleared the pathway for the kingdom to get wider access to advanced semiconductors.
Humain, owned by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, launched in May around the time of Trump’s visit. The hope is to turn the Gulf nation into a regional artificial intelligence superpower by building data centers, AI infrastructure and cloud capabilities. Humain plans to add 1.9 gigawatts’ worth of data centers by 2030.
The Saudi AI firm is also working with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on a joint venture that will likely see AMD own equity in a special purpose fund being created in the kingdom, Amin said. That’s part of a $10 billion deal the two companies signed earlier this year to build AI infrastructure.
Humain counts companies from Qualcomm Inc. to Cisco Systems Inc. as partners as well, and it’s in early talks with the Elon Musk AI startup xAI on a data center deal in Saudi Arabia, Bloomberg reported last month.
— With assistance from Omar El Chmouri and Mark Bergen
bloomberg.com |
