NVIDIA & AMD Score AI Hub Deals in Saudi Arabia

HUMAIN, the AI company launched by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, has announced deals with NVIDIA and AMD to build AI factories, hoping to elevate Saudi Arabia to become one of the major AI hubs outside the United States.

The deals were announced May 13 as part of President Donald Trump's visit to the Gulf states, alongside a broader deal that includes a $20 billion commitment by Saudi Arabian firm DataVolt to invest in datacenters and energy infrastructure in the US.

What is HUMAIN?

HUMAIN, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, intends to buy "several hundred thousand" NVIDIA GPUs during the next five years to build AI factories in Saudi Arabia, according to NVIDIA's announcement. The work will include Saudi Arabia's first deployment of an NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud -- a cloud for running digital-twin simulations.

HUMAIN's first step, though, is the purchase of one GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer, which includes 18,000 NVIDIA chips and, incidentally, will use InfiniBand networking. Selling entire supercomputers as a product unit is part of NVIDIA's future, and the company is building facilities in Houston and Dallas to ensure that some of that manufacturing can be done in the United States.

AMD is HUMAIN's second source, with HUMAIN intending to spend up to $10 billion on "500 megawatts of AI compute capacity" during the next five years. That shopping list includes AMD Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, Pensando DPUs, and Ryzen AI (for on-device edge computing).

Putting the AI Numbers in Perspective

To put HUMAIN's numbers in perspective, though, consider the large-scale AI infrastructure pledges already underway. Ten billion dollars is a lot, but it's also the size of xAI's supposedly pending deal to use Oracle's cloud, according to Reuters. And while 500MW projects are certainly large, consider that xAI has mulled expanding its Memphis campus to a capacity of 1.56 gigawatts.

Meanwhile, xAI is also a member of Black Rock's AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), which intends to raise $30 billion to put toward AI datacenters and related energy projects. AIP hopes to expand to $100 billion including debt financing.

Then there's Stargate, the US-focused joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and Abu Dhabi's MGX. Stargate plans to invest $500 billion over four years to build campuses exceeding 1 gigawatt of capacity each. Its starting point is a campus in Abilene, Texas, where it plans to accept 64,000 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs by the end of 2026.

None of this means NVIDIA and AMD are wrong to tout their deals with HUMAIN, of course. But for NVIDIA especially, the deals appear to have a political motivation as well. NVIDIA is particularly vulnerable to Trump's volatile economic policies, especially tariffs and restrictions on sales to China. Huang is not above playing politics to stay in the administration's good graces, and a series of Gulf-state deals (Trump is headed to the UAE next) would certainly help do that.

Futuriom Take: HUMAIN's projects could elevate Saudi Arabia's role in the global AI landscape -- but don't get carried away by the big numbers. When viewed at the scale of the AI building frenzy and NVIDIA's big contracts, HUMAIN is another job among many.