1 week ago
6157
.png)
The CEO of Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN has said that they will be launching a large venture capital fund, and it could top a planned $10 billion vehicle.
Tareq Amin said this in an interview published Wednesday, as the Public Investment Fund (PIF)-owned company presses its bid to turn the kingdom into a hub for global AI compute.
It is said that HUMAIN is eyeing a $2.5 billion fund aimed specifically at data centers, a figure it noted sits at the smaller end of announced Gulf AI commitments.
No passive checks, and a domestic arm called HUMAIN Limitless
Amin said, “We don’t do passive investments, that will never happen.” The fund will back companies only if they agree to run some compute on Saudi data centers or move staff into the kingdom.
They are planning for offices in the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, and the United Kingdom, and the CEO said that the spread is meant to speed up the pace of deals.
Alongside the global vehicle, HUMAIN intends to put in place a separate arm, HUMAIN Limitless, to fund and support AI companies inside Saudi Arabia.
The xAI wager that emboldened the plan
HUMAIN’s appetite has grown on the back of one deal. Its CEO stated that the $3 billion investment they made in Elon Musk’s xAI in February was “a home run.” That stake was converted into SpaceX equity after xAI merged with the rocket company.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which controls HUMAIN together with Aramco, has since disclosed a $26 billion holding in SpaceX.
According to Amin, that earlier investment is proof that the strategy works.
A buildout financed on bankable offtake deals
Since HUMAIN was founded by the PIF, the AI company has moved pretty fast, as it flagged six gigawatts of AI data centers in the kingdom by 2034. HUMAIN also secured a 16-gigawatt power commitment from the Saudi Ministry of Energy and struck deals with Nvidia, Groq, Qualcomm, and xAI.
The spending is being funded partly through debt. Amin said global hyperscaler demand let HUMAIN borrow against offtake agreements with large technology firms, calling those contracts “bankable.”
A $3 billion partnership with Blackstone is helping cover data center deals. Amin stated that computing in Saudi Arabia is about 30% cheaper than elsewhere. He said this is why demand for it has been steady despite the conflict in the region.
Al Moammar Information Systems reportedly expanded a HUMAIN data center contract to 250 megawatts (MW). That deal is now valued at more than 8.76 billion riyals, or about $2.34 billion.
HUMAIN recently paired with DataVolt on the first 100 MW phase of a 360 MW facility in Neom’s Oxagon zone, slated for 2028. It is estimated that Saudi AI and cloud expansion could need up to $42 billion by 2030.
Chips secured, data centers hardened, a line drawn at Chinese models
Access to advanced silicon is very important in all these workings. The US approved its first exports of advanced AI chips to HUMAIN in November 2025.
Amin said a US-Saudi strategic AI partnership gives the company the chip capacity it needs. “I don’t see any obstacles or issues for us to obtain the chip capacity we need,” he said.
Based on the export controls imposed on China, Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of President Trump’s US administration, is ensuring that they stay compliant with the control. So HUMAIN will not let Chinese frontier labs train models on its compute.
It will only be offering inference access to Chinese open-source models, with Amin stating that the split keeps the company within the US framework because it is “not furnishing a training cluster to Chinese frontier labs.”
Security has climbed the agenda too. With AI infrastructure elsewhere in the Gulf hit during the US-Iran war, Amin said HUMAIN is hardening and distributing its sites, treating them, in his words, “like critical national infrastructure.”
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.
English (US)