Tareq Amin, CEO of the human, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, attend the Saudi investment forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Saudi Arabia is about to make data its new oil – if the artificial intelligence and human data center is making its way.
The company, owned by the huge sovereign fund of the Saudi kingdom, the public investment fund, seeks to strengthen the capacity of the data center in a country with apparently unlimited land and abundant energy resources.
Faced with the decline in oil prices and the costs of the flambée of the interior megapro-projects such as the futuristic region of the Neom, the kingdom hopes that the demand for data for data and computer facilities will serve as a reliable milk cow for decades to come.
“Our ambition is very clear. We want to be the third largest IA supplier in the world, behind the United States and China,” Tareq Amin, Human CEO, at CNBC on Tuesday.
Launched in May this year, just a day before the visit of the American president Donald Trump in the kingdom, the human aims to offer complete AI capacities through data centers, infrastructure, cloud platforms and advanced AI models, which, according to her, will position Saudi Arabia as a Hub AI of the region.
Human does not disclose investment objectives, but has announced $ 23 billion for strategic technological partnerships and a venture capital fund of $ 10 billion. The PIF, which owns it, oversees nearly 1 billion of dollars in active in a wide strip of sectors and countries.
“My investments are strategic in nature. Any startup that really meets my number one requirements … The joint creation of intellectual property, location, workload consumption in Saudi, is really where we are going and investing capital,” said Amin. “So, I put a lot of capital in the infrastructure, which means, think of Groq and other companies in which we will invest, then the layers of application.”
The IA company based in California Groq in February obtained a $ 1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia for a extended delivery of its chips. In December, Groq built what he said was the largest inference cluster of the region in the region in the kingdom.
“Groqcloud services are now available for nearly four billion people adjacent to KSA. This deployment of Groq Inference infrastructure now allows EMEA market service and South Asia in an invisible way,” said company earlier this year in a statement.
Human is also in partnership with American giants Dmla And NvidiaFor fleas that will provide ambitious plans for building human data centers.
The company belonging to PIF began the construction of two large campuses in the kingdom composed of 11 data centers. Each data center will have a capacity of 200 megawatts. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the human wants 50 megawatts built, followed by 50 additional megawatts per quarter in 2026.
By 2030, it targets the installation of 1.9 gigawatts and six gigawatts by 2034.
Saudi Arabia is faced with strong competition from the United Arab Emirates, which continue with its own major partnerships with American technology giants on a certain number of projects, including the Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi. The Stargate project is an investment vehicle focused on the private sector in the private sector of $ 500 billion, announced by Openai in January in partnership with the investment company Abu Dhabi MGX and Japan’s SoftBank, and will be built with the help of Oracle, Nvidia And Cisco systems.
Other questions remain regarding the cost and environmental impact of the race and cooling of the kilometers of data centers in the burning deserts of the Middle East, as well as the ability to draw IA engineers to live in Saudi Arabia.
