As part of the avalanche of business deals coming from President Trump’s Middle East tour, both AMD and Nvidia have struck multi-billion dollar deals with an emerging Saudi AI firm.
The deals served as the coming out party for Humain, a state-backed artificial intelligence (AI) company that operates under the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The company is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 strategy to diversify the Saudi economy away from just oil sales.
Humain’s mission is to develop and manage AI infrastructure and services across not just Saudi Arabia but to the world.
Humain has four areas of focus: infrastructure, with the construction of next-generation data centers with a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts; developing robust cloud solutions to support AI applications; creating sophisticated AI LLM models; and fostering local innovation and attracting global talent to build a skilled workforce in AI.
Both deals are staggering in scope. Nvidia said it will supply 18,000 of its advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell AI chips for Humain’s initial deployment in hyperscale AI data centers, with plans to significantly expand this number over the next five years.
These will provide a secure foundational infrastructure for training and deploying sovereign AI models at scale, available to not only Saudi Arabia but a worldwide customer base.
Humain will deploy the Nvidia Omniverse platform as a multi-tenant system to drive acceleration of the new era of physical AI and robotics through simulation, optimization and operation of physical environments by new human-AI-led solutions.
The AMD deal did not discuss the number of chips involved in the deal, but it is valued at $10 billion. AMD and Humain plan to develop a comprehensive AI infrastructure through a network of AMD-based AI data centers that will extend from Saudi Arabia to the US and support a wide range of AI workloads across corporate, start-up, and government markets. Think of it as AWS but only offering AI as a service.
AMD will provide its AI compute portfolio – Epyc, Instinct, and FPGA networking — and the AMD ROCm open software ecosystem, while Humain will manage the delivery of the hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects.
The partners expect to activate a multi-exaflop network by early 2026, supported by next-generation AI silicon, modular data center zones, and a software platform stack focused on developer enablement, open standards, and interoperability.
Amazon Web Services also got a piece of the action, announcing a more than $5 billion investment to build an “AI zone” in the Kingdom. The zone is the first of its kind and will bring together multiple capabilities, including dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers, UltraCluster networks for faster AI training and inference, AWS services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as Amazon Q. Like the AMD project, the zone will be available in 2026.
Humain only emerged this month, so little is known about it. But given that it is backed by Crown Prince Salman and has the full weight of the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which ranks among the world’s largest and most influential sovereign wealth funds, one analyst expects big things from it.
“Saudi Arabia has recently prioritized AI as a cornerstone of its Vision 2030 strategy, aiming to diversify its economy and position itself as a global technology leader. With the launch of Humain as a dedicated vehicle for AI investment, we can anticipate a surge of interest from technology vendors worldwide, all eager to participate in and benefit from the substantial opportunities that will arise as the Kingdom accelerates its AI ambitions,” sad Manoj Sukumaran, principal analyst with Omdia.
The country has plenty of natural gas and other petroleum sources to address the power requirements of the large data centers needed to host the AI compute infrastructure. Sukumaran cites OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman, who said the abundance of AI will be limited by the abundance of energy. “Saudi Arabia well placed in the energy aspect, so it is just a matter of building intelligence and I expect Humain to play a critical role for that,” said Sukumaran.
Source:: Network World