Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence champion HUMAIN will supply computing power to Cohere, an Nvidia-backed large language model developer and one of Canada’s biggest startups.
Announced during Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to the kingdom last week, the deal follows a thawing of bilateral relations after a years-long diplomatic rift over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. It also marks Cohere’s first major deployment outside North America. HUMAIN will dedicate at least 50 megawatts of compute to Cohere’s new models starting in late 2027, part of Saudi Arabia’s ambition to be a global hub for AI infrastructure. The pair will also work together on Arabic-language AI models.
Cohere, which competes with Anthropic and OpenAI in enterprise sales, has made government contracts a focus. Such expertise is in demand in the Gulf: Last week, the UAE tapped Microsoft to automate government services in partnership with its own G42.