On Tuesday, both Amazon and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced partnerships with HUMAIN, a newly formed company tasked with driving artificial intelligence adoption across Saudi Arabia. These announcements follow reports that the US administration intends to facilitate AI chip deals between American firms and Gulf nations.
Amazon Web Services will invest $5.3 billion in HUMAIN to help it create a so-called “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia, building servers and other AI infrastructure. This is in addition to the AWS infrastructure region currently under construction in the Kingdom, expected to launch in 2026.
The two companies will collaborate to develop AI solutions and Arabic Large Language Models for the government, energy, healthcare, and education sectors, accelerating adoption. In addition, AWS and HUMAIN intend to expand access to cloud technology tools to support Saudi Arabia’s startup sector, while AWS will scale its Amazon Academy training offerings in AI and cloud, committing to upskilling 100,000 citizens.
On the same day, chip manufacturer AMD announced a $10 billion collaboration with HUMAIN to build AI infrastructure and data centres in both Saudi Arabia and the US. AMD, which opened its new Riyadh office in February, intends to deploy 500 MW of compute capacity over the next five years and aims to achieve multi-exaflop capacity available by the start of next year.
Like with AWS’s deal, this partnership aims to extend AI access across enterprise, startup, and sovereign sectors. AMD will supply GPUs, CPUs, DPUs, and its open software platform, while HUMAIN will manage end-to-end infrastructure deployment, including data centres, power systems, and fibre connectivity.
“This is not just another infrastructure play – it’s an open invitation to the world’s innovators,” Tareq Amin, chief executive officer of HUMAIN, said in a press release. “We are democratizing AI at the compute level, ensuring that access to advanced AI is limited only by imagination, not by infrastructure.”
The AWS and AMD partnerships follow the announcement that American chip maker NVIDIA will sell 18,000 of its most advanced AI chips to HUMAIN for a 500 megawatt data centre in the Kingdom.
Trump’s Gulf States tour aims to facilitate more chip deals between the US and Saudi Arabia
HUMAIN has been established under the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. PIF is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who announced the launch of HUMAIN on May 13 during the Saudi-US Investment Forum.
The forum was held as part of a Gulf States tour currently being undertaken by President Donald Trump and multiple US tech CEOs. So far, Trump has announced that Saudi Arabian companies will invest $600 billion in American enterprises, many of them AI companies and initiatives.
One key aim of the tour appears to be forging a chip-focused alliance between the US and Saudi Arabia. The former dominates the AI chip market, while the latter, through its expansive PIF, has the capital to support American tech firms, with the likes of Google and Salesforce already tapping it. Furthermore, as of September, Saudi Arabia requires all AI companies operating within the Kingdom to store data locally, creating demand for the infrastructure that US firms can deliver.
Trump has revoked a restriction that limited how many AI chips countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could buy, allowing the deals with AWS, AMD, and NVIDIA to take place. The so-called “AI diffusion rule” was instituted by the Biden administration with the aim of keeping advanced chips out of China, and was unpopular with the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. Concerns about China remain and, according to Bloomberg, US officials are weighing whether to maintain control over who can access data centres that run on American-made AI chips.
