What happens when one of the richest countries on earth decides it wants to lead the AI revolution, and what if the United States quietly opens the gate, allowing its most powerful chips to flow into the desert - not through traditional tech hubs - but to Saudi Arabia?
Launched last week at the 2025 Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh, Humain AI is the Kingdom’s bold US$1 trillion AI gamble that marks a shift in alliances that could shape the future landscape of the global tech industry.
To explain the giant war chest, Humain AI is fully backed by Saudi Arabia's public investment fund (PIF) and is led directly by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), with an aim to build cutting edge AI products coded in both English and Arabic.
Humain plans to develop its own massive data centres, foundational models and even proprietary infrastructure for AI development in the Arab world.
Shifting sands
It's part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 - a national plan to transform the Saudi economy beyond oil dependence.
MBS wants the Kingdom to become a central hub of technological innovation, using its geographical position as a continental gateway between Europe, Asia and Africa.
In a timely move just before the 2025 forum kicked off, the U.S. government relaxed export controls on semiconductors and other advanced AI chips for trusted partners such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Gulf nations.
It opened the floodgates for tech giants such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD and others to legally sell and ship products under embargo to rival countries such as China.
This strategic shift means the AI race is now open to the Gulf, and within days of Trump’s lifting of those restrictions, the U.S. tech giants decided to step in.
US tech deals
Deals worth billions have been made so far…
NVIDIA is going to supply more than 18,000 of its top-of-the-line GPUs for Saudi Arabia's planned 500MW AI data centre.
AMD will also build out 500MW of computing power over five years - for an estimated $10 billion.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged >$5.3 billion to help build a dedicated ‘AI zone’ in partnership with Humain, with a goal to localise services, power Arabic language models and bring scalable AI directly into the Saudi ecosystem.
Cisco to join forces with Humain AI initiative to “help build the world’s most open, scalable, resilient and cost-efficient AI infrastructure”.
Qualcomm will also help deliver Saudi Arabia's AI data centre infrastructure, cloud systems and workforce training systems.
However, these deals are not the first made by tech companies in Saudi Arabia.
Microsoft recently invested $2.1 billion in a global super-scale cloud and says it will generate $24 billion for Saudi GDP in four years, Oracle invested $1.5 billion to expand its MENA business by launching new cloud areas in the Kingdom in 2024, and interestingly, China-backed Huawei invested $400 million in cloud infrastructure in the Kingdom back in 2023.
(All figures are in USD unless otherwise stated)
