The News
Saudi Arabia’s new artificial intelligence national champion HUMAIN has already sold out capacity at all its existing data centers and those it has under construction, its chief executive said in an interview, as the world’s biggest AI firms race to secure low-cost computing power to build and operate their models.
HUMAIN, created on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s visit to the Middle East this year, is now looking to expand its partnership with US chipmaker Groq to keep up with demand, Tareq Amin told Semafor: HUMAIN and Groq host what they call the world’s largest AI inferencing hub in the world in Saudi Arabia, with users in more than 130 countries.
The Saudi firm is also considering raising money from external investors to join its planned $10 billion venture capital arm backing AI startups globally, Amin said.
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Matthew’s view
Global demand for HUMAIN’s data centers is a shot in the arm for Saudi Arabia’s strategy of using cheap energy and its abundance of land to position itself as a lower cost hub for the processing capacity needed to fuel AI applications.
With only about 1% of HUMAIN’s customers for AI processing coming from within the kingdom, the platform is positioned to bring in revenue from outside Saudi Arabia, living up to the hype of data being the new oil.
One of the main hurdles to HUMAIN’s growth, however, is access to the most powerful chips, which are mostly made by US firms and subject to Washington’s export controls. Amin expects that HUMAIN will get approvals to buy semiconductors from Nvidia and other companies from the Trump administration, which has moved to loosen restrictions on chip exports to the Gulf.
“After President Trump visited Saudi Arabia, I’m fairly confident that we have the right structure in place to achieve what we need to get done,” Amin said. Trump was accompanied on the visit by many of the US’ leading technology bosses, which “set the right tone” for boosting cooperation between the two countries, he said.
Know More
HUMAIN launched its first consumer product on Monday, a large language model called HUMAIN Chat that operates in Arabic and English and that will form the foundation for other commercial applications the company will launch later this year.
Its announcement follows similar moves by Abu Dhabi and Qatar to launch Arabic-language LLMs in a bid to position themselves as rival centers for AI.
HUMAIN plans to develop 1.9 gigawatts of new data center capacity by 2030, expanding that to 6 GW by 2034. It hasn’t previously disclosed existing data center capacity. The company is in talks with Saudi Arabia’s energy minister and domestic power companies about securing the electricity needed for those facilities, Amin said, and has locked up the power it needs for a 100 megawatt data center to be delivered next year.
Step Back
Controlled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, HUMAIN was created by the acquisition and merger of existing AI businesses in the country including Aramco Digital, the AI unit of the kingdom’s national oil company, and Saudi Company for AI, which was created by the Public Investment Fund in 2021. Amin was previously the CEO of Aramco Digital.
In addition to building out data center capacity and developing AI applications, HUMAIN plans to invest in technology startups. “I think very soon HUMAIN will go to raise capital from third parties, but the timing has to be right,” Amin said.
The company is in the final stages of making its first investments, and will target Saudi companies and international startups that are willing to bring some of their operations to the kingdom, he said.
Notable
- Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions risk mirroring China’s data center boom — where nearly 80% of computing power goes unused — unless it can attract the talent and software needed to develop homegrown AI applications, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson writes.
- The kingdom can benefit from taking lessons in its AI buildup from the last place it wants to look: Israel, writes Semafor columnist Jon Medved, founder of the Jerusalem-based venture investment platform OurCrowd.