During Nvidia’s latest earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang named some of the customers driving the AI chip company’s revenue surge. This included the three largest cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as well as the most famous AI startups: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI. But that includes a little-known Saudi startup, Humane, which received not one but three criticisms for Huang’s comments.
Although only six months old, Humain is quickly becoming a major force in building AI infrastructure globally. Founded by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and backed by the country’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, Humane has an ambition to supply 6% of the world’s AI computing capacity by 2034, making it the world’s third-largest AI data center provider after the US and China.
Huang’s mention of Humane during Nvidia’s earnings call came a day after the CEO attended a state dinner at the White House for the crown prince, who is visiting the United States for the first time since 2018. At the same time as his visit, Humane announced a deal with Nvidia and Amazon to equip new data centers with 150,000 Nvidia chips, including some of the most advanced Grace Blackwell 300 chips. The “AI Zone” is under construction in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
The company also signed a landmark agreement with xAI to build its 500 MW data center in Saudi Arabia. Nvidia will also supply chips to its data centers.
“Thanks to our deep partnership with Elon and xAI, we were able to bring that opportunity to Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia, and Humane was also able to host the xAI opportunity,” Huang said during the earnings call.
Under the leadership of former Aramco executive Tarek Amin, Humane aims to be a “full stack” AI company, managing not only the data centers where AI models run, but also the construction of the models themselves. The company trained and launched a large-scale language model called ALAM. The model is designed to not only avoid culturally and politically sensitive topics, but also outperform its competitors on Arabic language tasks. It also launched an AI-native laptop and an AI operating system called Humain One.
But Humain’s biggest impact may be as an AI infrastructure builder, building data centers that it leases to other cloud hyperscalers and AI companies. Saudi Arabia believes it can provide AI software for 30% less than the cost of a similar process in the United States, due to its abundant energy resources such as solar power, oil and gas, as well as the ease of permitting and construction within the country. The country also has strong fiber optic connections with other countries.
That makes Humain the preferred AI provider in many parts of the Middle East and Asia, with the potential to pull in workloads from even further afield.
Does anyone else want to become an AI hub in the Middle East?
Saudi Arabia is not the only country seeking to establish itself as a “third pole” for AI development outside of the United States and China. Regional rival the United Arab Emirates has similar ambitions. Through its own sovereign wealth fund, the UAE is backing G42, a company that is also pursuing a “full stack” approach to AI development.
G42 has been around since 2018 and has gotten a head start on Humain in building large-scale data centers for generative AI models. However, U.S. national security officials under the Biden administration have expressed concerns about G42’s ties to Chinese companies and have put a hold on exports of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to the company. These officials were concerned that AI technology would be leaked to Chinese companies. A $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft in April 2024, partially brokered by the U.S. government, was supposed to pave the way for the G42 to receive NVIDIA chips, but both companies complained that even after the deal was reached, the U.S. Department of Commerce was slow to approve exports of NVIDIA chips to the G42.
Some national security experts have expressed similar concerns about Mr. Humaine, since Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally but has a defense technology transfer agreement with China. Some Saudi companies, including oil giant Aramco, have also been vocal about using AI models developed by Chinese companies, such as DeepSeek.
But just this week, the Commerce Department approved the export of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Meanwhile, Humane has agreements with other AI chip providers besides Nvidia. Nvidia has signed a $10 billion deal with its biggest rival, AMD, to deploy 500 megawatts of AI computing based on AMD chips within the next five years. The company has entered into a partnership with Qualcomm to use its AI200 and AI250 AI chips for 200 megawatts of computing power starting in 2026. It also partnered with AI chip startup Groq.
