Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, and Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, attend the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 13, 2025.
Saudi Arabia is on the road to making data its new oil — if artificial intelligence and data center company Humain gets its way.
The company, owned by the Saudi kingdom's massive sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, is looking to build out data center capacity in a country with seemingly unlimited land and abundant energy resources.
Faced with lower oil prices and soaring costs for domestic megaprojects like the futuristic region of Neom, the kingdom is hoping that surging demand for the data and computing facilities will serve as a reliable cash cow for decades to come.
"Our ambition is very clear. We want to be the third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China," Tareq Amin, Humain CEO, told CNBC's Access Middle East on Tuesday.
Launched in May of this year, just a day before U.S. President Donald Trump's visit to the Kingdom, Humain aims to deliver full-stack AI capabilities across data centers, infrastructure, cloud platforms and advanced AI models, which it hopes will position Saudi Arabia as the region's AI hub.
Humain does not disclose investment targets, but has announced $23 billion for strategic technology partnerships and a $10 billion venture fund. The PIF, which owns it, oversees nearly $1 trillion in assets across a wide swathe of sectors and countries.
"My investments are all strategic in nature. Any startup that is really addressing my number one requirement ... the joint IP creation, the localization, workload consumptions in Saudi, is really where we're going and investing capital in," Amin said. "So I'm putting a lot of capital in infrastructure, meaning, think about Groq and other companies that we will be investing in, and then the application layers."
California-based AI company Groq in February secured a $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia for expanded delivery of its chips. In December, Groq built what it said was the region's largest AI inference cluster in the kingdom.