The year 2025 was pivotal for Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to establish itself not only as a regional but as an international centre for artificial intelligence (AI) and computational power. The Kingdom plans to leverage its abundant energy resources – including oil, natural gas and expanding solar capacity – to support large-scale data centres required to power the computational demands of advanced AI technologies.
Humain
A key moment for these ambitions came in May of that year with the launch of HUMAIN, the government-backed AI company. Owned by the Public Investment Fund and led by CEO Tareq Amin, HUMAIN is a central vehicle for domestic AI infrastructure development. The company’s mission is to develop and manage advanced AI technologies and unlock opportunities in the digital economy.
The launch of HUMAIN came during US President Donald Trump’s 2025 visit to Riyadh on the first leg of his Gulf tour. The trip coincided with a shift in US global tech strategy, as the White House announced it would be easing restrictions on exporting the most powerful microchips from US firm NVIDIA to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This was followed by a partnership announcement between NVIDIA and HUMAIN, under which NVIDIA will supply 18,000 of its GB300 Blackwell chips – among its most advanced AI accelerators – to the Kingdom, with the first shipment of chips arriving in December 2025.
Shifting Sands
The emphasis on AI and technology comes as Vision 2030 enters its final phase and amid a noticeable shift in resource allocation away from the giga-projects that have dominated the development narrative in recent years. Speaking on the sidelines of the annual Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October 2025, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Economy and Planning Faisal Al Ibrahim said, “We’re reprioritising a little bit towards sectors that need it the most, and today it’s technology and AI. We want to move into an economic structure that is productivity led and at the heart of productivity is technology, innovation and generative AI.” This shift aligns with a broader global narrative that identifies data as the new oil, a particularly pertinent commentary for hydrocarbons-rich countries like Saudi Arabia, which have placed economic diversification away from oil at the heart of their long-term development strategies.
The key to unlocking the data, however, is the computational power that fuels the generative AI tools that can sift through and make sense of that data. With its abundant supply of cheap energy, Saudi Arabia is uniquely positioned to take advantage. And indeed the Kingdom’s energy players have been quick to align themselves to the new economic trajectory with national oil company Aramco announcing in October 2025 that it plans to acquire a significant minority stake in HUMAIN.
Data Play
When it comes to data build out, Saudi Arabia is leading the charge regionally. At the start of 2026 the Kingdom officially launched the $2.7bn Hexagon Data Centre initiative. The 480-MW, Tier-IV facility will be the world’s largest such government facility once complete. Under the country’s National Data Strategy, meanwhile, the country plans to build up to 1.5 GW of data centre capacity by 2030, making it one of the largest planned computing infrastructure expansions in the Middle East. Separately, HUMAIN announced in November 2025 its own plans to establish multi-gigawatt AI compute capacity, with forecasts of up to 6.6 GW by the early 2030s – a level that would place the Kingdom among the top global suppliers of computational power. Alongside this, HUMAIN is securing key partnerships with leading global technology providers to strengthen and underpin its expansion. These include the cooperation with NVIDIA outlined above; a joint venture with AMD and Cisco to deploy up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030; and strategic agreements with Qualcomm to establish AI engineering and data centre capacity.
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