Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions were front and center as Trump made clear he is looking for even more U.S. investment from the Kingdom, seeking an additional $400 billion above the $600 billion Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman already promised in a January phone call with Trump.
Humain announced it would build massive AI data centers in Saudi Arabia to train and deploy the Kingdom’s sovereign AI models. Over the next five years the country will construct data centers packed with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s most advanced chips and a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts. The first deployment will be 18,000 of Nvidia’s latest chips to power a Saudi supercomputer.
The fact that Humain has been founded by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund, [the sovereign wealth fund that invests tens of billions of dollars of Saudi Arabia’s oil profits,] reflects the fact that this is an area of strategic priority for the Saudi government, said Andrew Leber, assistant professor in the department of political science and the Middle East & North African Studies program at Tulane University. “The public investment fund has enormous capital to put towards projects that they think will ultimately put Saudi Arabia at the center of global supply,” he said. “If Saudi Arabia is deeply embedded in the AI production process for Silicon Valley, for a country like the United States, that in turn further centers them in the global economy.”
Humain is essentially the embodiment of Saudi Arabia’s global and regional AI ambitions, added Martin Makaryan, a policy analyst who specializes in emerging technologies and security at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies. He explained that Riyadh understands it cannot become a global AI superpower—the real race is between the United States and China—but leading in AI development and deployment, at least in the Middle East, hits several of the Crown Prince’s targets for the country’s long-term vision.
“This isn’t simply an economic imperative for a country and government whose entire economy is based on oil exports,” he said. “It is a geopolitical move in line with Saudi Arabian aspirations for regional leadership in the Middle East and specifically in the Arab world—one of Humain’s main goals is, unsurprisingly, to become the leading developer of Arabic-language LLMs.”
But some experts cited concerns about the national security risks of opening up so much access for Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions, as well as the consequences of allowing the Kingdom so much economic and geopolitical influence.
“Ever since the Trump administration came into power, Saudi Arabia has been lobbying consistently to [get taken] off the restricted list,” said Janet Egan, senior fellow, technology and national security, at the Washington, D.C., think tank Center for a New American Security, referring to the list of countries the U.S. restricts from purchasing advanced AI chips. “The thing I’m worried about at the moment is that America makes short-term trade deals for short-term benefit—signing away any restrictions on chips—that undermine the United States’ long-term strategic advantage.”
She emphasized that from a security perspective, it does make sense to do some partnerships with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “We do want to bring them closer into the democratic orbit, even though they’re non-democratic nations,” she said. “But the idea of giving them unrestricted access when they have the energy, the capital, the money, the regulatory cut-through because of authoritarian regimes–when they outgrow the need for the U.S., I think that’s a real issue.” The U.S. has a very strong hand, she added: “They have a lot of leverage, and should use it, not throw that away easily.”
“They’ve got the funding and the size of the economy and the heft, they can compete with the UAE in terms of how much funding and permitting and offers they can throw around it to make AI happen there,” said Egan, of the Center for a New American Security.
And with a network of powerful AI data centers, Saudi Arabia is betting it could become economically indispensable to the kinds of supply chains that will become increasingly vital for countries like the United States, said Tulane University’s Leber.
“They really believe the promises of Silicon Valley executives, that this is an area where, if they invest money up front now, there will be a sizable non-oil revenue stream for them in the future,” said Leber. “They really want to get in on the ground floor of this.”
