The Scoop
Saudi Arabia’s leading AI firm HUMAIN will launch a large venture capital fund — potentially even bigger than a planned $10 billion vehicle — this year, the company’s chief executive told Semafor, as it looks to position the kingdom at the forefront of the technology.
Buoyed by its early success backing Elon Musk’s xAI ahead of its merger with SpaceX and initial public offering, the VC fund’s ambitions have expanded significantly. It will have offices in the US and Saudi Arabia as well as France and the UK and “will be really large as we want to be able to accelerate the pace of investment,” CEO Tareq Amin said.
HUMAIN’s $3 billion investment in xAI in February “was a home run,” Amin said in an interview. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which controls HUMAIN along with state oil company Aramco, has disclosed a $26 billion stake in SpaceX.
The AI firm will back companies that commit to using Saudi data centers for some of their compute operations or bringing staff to the country, Amin said. “We don’t do passive investments, that will never happen,” he said. It will also create HUMAIN Limitless, specifically for investing in and supporting AI companies in Saudi Arabia, he said.
Launched by the state-controlled Public Investment Fund in May 2025, HUMAIN has rapidly sought to deliver on the Saudi ambition to be an AI leader. It has already announced plans for six gigawatts of AI data centers in the kingdom by 2034, secured a 16 gigawatt power commitment from the Saudi Ministry of Energy, has an agreement with the US government for the supply of AI semiconductors, and has deals with US tech giants including xAI, Groq, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. The company has also taken stakes in AI startups including video generation company Luma AI and developed its own HUMAIN laptop and computer operating system.
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HUMAIN embarked on a massive investment in building data centers in the kingdom just as the country became embroiled in the US-Iran war. That has led the company to take additional steps to ensure security around its investments.
He also said the company was “hardening″ defenses around the data centers it is building as a result of the Iran war, which has seen AI infrastructure in other parts of the Gulf attacked.
“In this era, data centers are treated like critical national infrastructure,” Amin said. HUMAIN’s data centers are “distributed across the country and are being very well hardened in terms of security architecture.” Saudi Arabia is applying the same lessons in resiliency that Aramco, one of HUMAIN’s shareholders, applied to securing its oil infrastructure, Amin said. Despite the conflict, HUMAIN has not seen any slowdown in demand from AI companies to use its data centers, which are about 30% cheaper for compute customers than elsewhere in the world, he said.
Demand from global hyperscalers has also enabled the company to finance the buildout with borrowing secured on offtake agreements with some of the world’s largest technology firms. “We’ve been able to accelerate raising debt for HUMAIN because all of these offtakes are bankable,” Amin said. That has also helped the firm navigate its huge investment plans at a time when many projects in the kingdom are scaling back spending — aided by a $3 billion partnership with Blackstone to fund its data center deals.
HUMAIN, which is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was launched just ahead of US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia last year. Amin also accompanied the crown prince on his visit to Washington last year, where the governments of the two countries announced a strategic AI partnership. While exact details of that agreement have not been revealed, Amin said it gives HUMAIN access to all the semiconductors it needs for its ambitions.
“We have a phenomenal relationship with the US government and the export controls function of the government,” he said. “I don’t see any obstacles or issues for us to obtain the chip capacity we need.”
Despite all the hype surrounding the industry and the huge investment pouring into it, Amin says it is likely not enough to keep up with demand. “I think the world is still underestimating what is going to come, and does not have enough power capacity to build for this demand,” he said. HUMAIN is not currently increasing its data center build out plans, but is “preparing for the inevitable,” he said. “I need to prepare contingencies and If I get asked by His Royal Highness to accelerate our plans, I will absolutely accelerate.”
As part of that deal with the US government, HUMAIN will not allow Chinese frontier AI models to be trained on its compute capacity. Instead, it will offer access to Chinese open-source models on its Saudi data centers. “This is all acceptable under the framework with the US because HUMAIN is not furnishing a training cluster to Chinese frontier labs, we are only providing inferencing,” Amin said.
Notable
- In November 2025, the US approved the first exports of advanced AI chips to HUMAIN, the Saudi state-backed artificial intelligence firm, in a significant win for the company.