The main trump card in this campaign is Humain, a domestic company owned by a state fund weighing almost a trillion dollars, which develops a complete ecosystem of data centers, cloud services and large language models, writes CNN.
The Humain project was unveiled by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman back in May, and this week at the annual Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, the scale and financial power behind it became much clearer.
Humain’s CEO, Tareq Amin, aims to turn Saudi Arabia into the world’s third-largest artificial intelligence market, behind the United States and China. While this is a bold ambition for a new player in the industry, Amin argues that the Kingdom’s key advantage lies in its abundant and cheap energy sources, crucial to powering data centers that consume huge amounts of energy.
“We have an advantage in Saudi Arabia,” he told CNN. “Look at this country’s incredible power grid that doesn’t require a company like Humain to build substations and provide power for a data center. That means I’ve saved 18 months of time.”
Humain plans to build data centers with a total power of six gigawatts across the country by 2034, and the list of key partners includes technology giants such as Nvidia, AMD, Amazon Web Services, Qualcomm and Cisco.
Last Tuesday, the company also announced a $3 billion deal with private equity giant Blackstone to build data centers in the Kingdom.
Humain One, an operating system powered by artificial intelligence, where users assign tasks by voice or text, instead of traditional clicking on icons as in Windows or iOS systems, was also presented. Humain already uses AI internally to manage most of its departments – from HR and finance to legal and IT. Amin points out that his payroll department now has only one employee, while the rest of the work is done by AI agents.
This powerful shift towards artificial intelligence comes as the Kingdom enters the final phase of its “Vision 2030” economic transformation plan. Faced with challenges such as falling oil prices and delays in mega-projects such as Neom, the AI initiative is taking on new importance as a driver of growth in the Arab world’s largest economy.
Saudi Arabia also faces competition from neighboring United Arab Emirates, which has its own AI company G42. The UAE recently secured a landmark contract with the Trump administration to build the “Stargate UAE” project, a massive $500 billion data center, billed as the largest outside the US with the help of OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco.
When asked if there was room for two regional heavyweights, Amin said he supported the democratization of artificial intelligence, while emphasizing the strength of Humain’s approach.
“It is good for humanity that knowledge – especially that related to artificial intelligence – is not centralized in one location. So what is happening in the UAE is good. What is happening in Saudi Arabia is very good,” he said. “I’ll tell you what we decided to do, and it’s very different… Humain is not a holding company. We’re an operating company.”
(Vijesti.ba)
