Humain, Saudi Arabia’s new AI start-up backed by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, will launch a $10bn (SR37.5bn) venture capital fund as it taps major US tech companies for investment, the Financial Times (FT) reported.
The company’s chief executive officer, Tareq Amin, said Humain will launch its fund this summer and will focus on investing in start-ups in the US, Europe and Asia.
Humain is now looking for a US tech company to become an equity partner in its data centre business, Amin told the FT. He said the company was in talks with OpenAI, venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and Elon Musk’s xAI.
“We are in discussions with all of them,” Amin said, but declined to specify which companies were interested in becoming equity partners. “Some of them, which you will hear about very soon, are massive names in the data centre segment.”
The government-backed company was unveiled during US President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to Riyadh. A major focus of his trip in the Middle East was securing major investment deals. He was accompanied by top executives including Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altmer and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Humain has already struck deals with Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services and Qualcomm worth $23bn, according to Amin. The company aims to have 1.9GW of data centre capacity by 2030, increasing to 6.6GW by 2034; for context, the city of San Francisco requires around 1GW of power. The project’s cost is estimated at $77bn.
There were multiple investment announcements related to Humain during Trump’s visit to the Middle East. Nvidia announced it would sell the first batch of its latest Blackwell chips, totalling 18,000, to Humain. US chip company Advanced Micro Devices also announced a $10bn collaboration with the Saudi start-up.
The US President’s visit to the Middle East reflected a ‘pay-to-play’ form of politics that Trump has widely advertised. The extent to which this strategy has become entrenched in the US’ approach to foreign relations became evident when Trump accepted a $400m luxury aircraft from the Qatari royal family to become part of the Air Force One fleet, the president’s official mode of transport.
