Saudi AI firm Humain is pouring billions into data. Will it pay off?

Saudi Arabia is looking to make 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.

Saudi Arabia faces stiff competition from the neighboring United Arab Emirates, which is forging ahead with its own major partnerships with U.S. tech giants on a number of projects, including the Stargate Campus in Abu Dhabi. The Stargate Project is a $500 billion private sector AI-focused investment vehicle, announced by OpenAI in January in partnership with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX and Japan’s SoftBank, and will be built with the help of Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco Systems. 

While Saudi Arabia’s data center market is projected to grow from $1.33 billion in 2024 to $3.9 billion by 2030, it still has a long way to go before reaching the scale of the U.S. market, currently valued at over $200 billion.

Further questions remain as to the cost and environmental impact of running and cooling miles of data centers in the Middle East’s scorching deserts, as well as the ability to draw AI engineers to live in Saudi Arabia.

Access to skill and talent remains a major challenge — to bridge that gap, Saudi Arabia relies heavily on foreign talent, with professionals that require high salaries and often don’t stay in the kingdom for a sustained period of time.

Even with the offer of ample pay, drawing and retaining AI engineers will prove difficult for the kingdom. AI-related roles in Saudi Arabia remain largely vacant, with a 50% hiring gap, according to Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Ahmed Al-Rajhi.

In comparison to the UAE, which has a more consistent strategy of attracting investment and executing government strategy, Saudi Arabia is more likely to “struggle” when it comes to AI engineers, said Baghdad Gherras, a UAE-based venture partner at Antler, which invests in early-stage AI ventures.

“I think the bottom up version of Saudi is extremely concentrated at the top, but there is a kind of … lag at the middle management and how the vision is being communicated and translated on the ground,” he said.

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.

“GroqCloud services are now available to nearly four billion people regionally adjacent to the KSA. This deployment of Groq AI inference infrastructure is now enabling service to the EMEA and South Asia markets in ways unseen before,” the company said earlier this year in a statement.

Humain is also in partnership with U.S. chipmaking giants AMD and Nvidia, for chips that will supply Humain’s ambitious data center construction plans.

The PIF-owned firm has started construction on two large campuses in the kingdom made up of 11 data centers. Each data center will have a 200-megawatt capacity. By the fourth quarter of 2025 Humain wants 50 megawatts built, followed by an additional 50 megawatts every quarter into 2026.

By 2030 it is targeting installation of 1.9 gigawatts, and six gigawatts by 2034.