Saudi Arabia is strengthening its ties with American AI companies — announcing a flurry of new joint ventures worth billions of dollars. The country seeks to make its mark in the AI industry as its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, makes his first visit to the United States in years.
Humain — an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — announced a series of partnerships with prominent American tech companies, including xAI, Cisco, AMD and Qualcomm, during a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington on Wednesday.
Saudi Arabia is trying to further firm up ties with the United States and shift its economy away from oil. For American companies, the Middle Eastern country answers three urgent problems for AI expansion: funding, space and cheap energy.
Elon Musk announced at Wednesday’s event that xAI, his AI company, will develop a huge data center in Saudi Arabia alongside Humain. The planned 500-megawatt data center would be xAI’s first large-scale center outside of the United States, and the partnership will see xAI’s Grok chatbot deployed throughout Saudi Arabia.
“The future of intelligence will be engineered through massive and efficient compute combined with the most advanced AI models,” Musk said in a statement on Wednesday.
The center will be powered by chips from Nvidia, whose founder, Jensen Huang, sat alongside Musk and Saudi Arabian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha at Wednesday’s panel. No further details about the partnership were revealed.
“This is how we walk the talk in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with the US,” Alswaha said. “Yesterday, the president and his royal highness announced the AI strategic framework and partnership. Today we’re going big with Elon and Jensen, so thank you for those opportunities.”
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the United States is set to approve the first sales of advanced AI chips to Humain.
At the event, Alswaha announced a 100-megawatt data center for Amazon Web Services “with a gigawatt ambition” that also will be powered by Nvidia’s infrastructure. AWS said in a statement that it plans “to provide, deploy and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators” in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.
As AI companies expand, their huge data centers need space and massive energy sources. Many data centers are being built in the United States, including xAI’s Colossus in Memphis. However, there’s fear that China will beat out the United States when it comes to energy production to power AI systems. Saudi Arabia could help with that — it has much easier access to the space and energy needed to power these massive ventures.
The investment from Saudi Arabia also plays a major part in Prince bin Salman’s redemption in the United States, following being labeled a “pariah” by President Joe Biden for his role in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
During his Oval Office visit on Wednesday, Prince bin Salman claimed the country will be investing $1 trillion dollars in the United States, a substantial increase from the previously announced $600 billion investment in May. The comments surprised even President Donald Trump in the moment, although the timeline of the investments is not clear.
“You’re saying to me now that the $600 billion will be $1 trillion?” Trump said to Prince bin Salman in the Oval Office. “Good. I like that very much.”
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