Saudi Arabia’s homegrown AI company, Humain, is building out a full stack of data centres, cloud capabilities, large language models and applications to forward the country’s growing AI ambitions.
Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman unveiled Humain in May ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit to Riyadh. At the recent annual Future Investment Initiative in the same location, the scale and ambition behind the project came into clearer focus.
Humain CEO, Tareq Amin, is setting out to make Saudi Arabia the world’s third-largest AI market, after the United States and China. It’s a bold ambition for a newcomer to the industry, but Amin argues the Kingdom’s competitive edge lies in its abundant and cheap energy resources that can feed the seemingly insatiable demand for computing power.
“We have an advantage in Saudi Arabia”, he told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “Look at this country’s amazing energy grid that doesn’t require a company like Humain to build the substations and the power to deliver that to a data centre. That means I have saved 18 months of time”.
Humain plans to build up to six gigawatts in data centre capability across the country by 2034, with a rolodex of key AI partners, including Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services, Qualcomm and Cisco.
Humain has been using the AI system internally to run much of its HR, finance, legal, operational and IT departments. Amin says there is now only one employee in his payroll department, with AI agents handling the rest.
Humain does face competition from the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, which has its own AI vehicle, G42, and recently secured a landmark deal with the Trump administration to build “Stargate UAE,” a sprawling $500 billion data centre project billed as the largest outside the United States, with the help of OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco.
When asked whether there’s room for two regional heavyweights, Amin said he supports democratizing AI, while touting Humain’s robust operations.
“It is good for humanity to have knowledge — especially around AI — not to be all centralized in one location. So it’s good what is happening in the UAE. It’s very good what’s happening in Saudi Arabia”, he said. “I will tell you what we decided to do, which is very different … Humane is not a holding company. We are an operating company”.
Source: CNN
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