Saudi AI firm Humain is pouring billions into data. Will it pay off?

Published

3 months ago

August 27, 2025

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Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, and Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, attend the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia May 13, 2025.

Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters

Saudi Arabia is looking to make data its new oil — if artificial intelligence and data center company Humain gets its way.

The company, owned by the Saudi kingdom’s massive sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, is looking to build out data center capacity in a country with seemingly unlimited land and abundant energy resources.

Faced with lower oil prices and soaring costs for domestic megaprojects like the futuristic region of Neom, the kingdom is hoping that surging demand for the data and computing facilities will serve as a reliable cash cow for decades to come.

“Our ambition is very clear. We want to be the third-largest AI provider in the world, behind the United States and China,” Tareq Amin, Humain CEO, told CNBC’s Access Middle East on Tuesday.

Launched in May of this year, just a day before U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the Kingdom, Humain aims to deliver full-stack AI capabilities across data centers, infrastructure, cloud platforms and advanced AI models, which it hopes will position Saudi Arabia as the region’s AI hub.

Saudi Arabia's Humain CEO on building an Arabic rival to ChatGPT

Saudi Arabia faces stiff competition from the neighboring United Arab Emirates, which is forging ahead with its own major partnerships with U.S. tech giants on a number of projects, including the Stargate Campus in Abu Dhabi. The Stargate Project is a $500 billion private sector AI-focused investment vehicle, announced by OpenAI in January in partnership with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX and Japan’s SoftBank, and will be built with the help of Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco Systems.

While Saudi Arabia’s data center market is projected to grow from $1.33 billion in 2024 to $3.9 billion by 2030, it still has a long way to go before reaching the scale of the U.S. market, currently valued at over $200 billion.

Further questions remain as to the cost and environmental impact of running and cooling miles of data centers in the Middle East’s scorching deserts, as well as the ability to draw AI engineers to live in Saudi Arabia.

Access to skill and talent remains a major challenge — to bridge that gap, Saudi Arabia relies heavily on foreign talent, with professionals that require high salaries and often don’t stay in the kingdom for a sustained period of time.

Even with the offer of ample pay, drawing and retaining AI engineers will prove difficult for the kingdom. AI-related roles in Saudi Arabia remain largely vacant, with a 50% hiring gap, according to Minister of Human Resources and Social Development Ahmed Al-Rajhi.

In comparison to the UAE, which has a more consistent strategy of attracting investment and executing government strategy, Saudi Arabia is more likely to “struggle” when it comes to AI engineers, said Baghdad Gherras, a UAE-based venture partner at Antler, which invests in early-stage AI ventures.

“I think the bottom up version of Saudi is extremely concentrated at the top, but there is a kind of … lag at the middle management and how the vision is being communicated and translated on the ground,” he said.

Nvidia, AMD partnerships

Humain does not disclose investment targets, but has announced $23 billion for strategic technology partnerships and a $10 billion venture fund. The PIF, which owns it, oversees nearly $1 trillion in assets across a wide swathe of sectors and countries.

“My investments are all strategic in nature. Any startup that is really addressing my number one requirement … the joint IP creation, the localization, workload consumptions in Saudi, is really where we’re going and investing capital in,” Amin said. “So I’m putting a lot of capital in infrastructure, meaning, think about Groq and other companies that we will be investing in, and then the application layers.”

California-based AI company Groq in February secured a $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia for expanded delivery of its chips. In December, Groq built what it said was the region’s largest AI inference cluster in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is 'the most compelling’ investment opportunity amongst emerging markets

“GroqCloud services are now available to nearly four billion people regionally adjacent to the KSA. This deployment of Groq AI inference infrastructure is now enabling service to the EMEA and South Asia markets in ways unseen before,” the company said earlier this year in a statement.

Humain is also in partnership with U.S. chipmaking giants AMD and Nvidia, for chips that will supply Humain’s ambitious data center construction plans.

The PIF-owned firm has started construction on two large campuses in the kingdom made up of 11 data centers. Each data center will have a 200-megawatt capacity. By the fourth quarter of 2025 Humain wants 50 megawatts built, followed by an additional 50 megawatts every quarter into 2026.

By 2030 it is targeting installation of 1.9 gigawatts, and six gigawatts by 2034.

Technology

We’re increasing our Cisco Systems price target after an AI-fueled beat and raise

Published

4 hours ago

November 13, 2025

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We're increasing our Cisco Systems price target after an AI-fueled beat and raise

Technology

CNBC Daily Open: An AI and ‘everything else’ market in play in the U.S.

Published

4 hours ago

November 13, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: An AI and 'everything else' market in play in the U.S.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Nov. 12, 2025 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

The divergence between the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite on Wednesday stateside reinforces the suggestion that there are two markets operating in the U.S.: one of an artificial intelligence and another of “everything else.”

Not only did the Dow rise, it also secured its second consecutive record high and closed above the 48,000 level for the first time.

The index, which comprises 30 blue-chip companies, is typically seen as a marker of the “old economy.” That is to say, it is mostly made up of large, well-established companies driving the U.S. economy, such as banks, healthcare and industrials, before Silicon Valley became a mini sun powering everything.

And it was those stocks — Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly and Caterpillar — that lifted the Dow on Wednesday.

To be sure, new and flashy names, such as Nvidia and Salesforce, constitute the Dow too. But as the index is price-weighted, meaning that companies with higher share prices influence the Dow more, tech companies don’t exert as much gravity on it.

That’s in contrast to the Nasdaq, which is weighted by companies’ market capitalization, and dominated mainly by technology firms. The tech-heavy index fell as shares like Oracle and Palantir slipped — even Advanced Micro Devices’ 9% pop on its growth prospects couldn’t rescue the Nasdaq from the red.

It’s not necessarily a warning sign about overexuberance in AI.

“There’s nothing wrong, in our view, of kind of trimming back, taking some gains and re-diversifying across other spots in the equity markets,” said Josh Chastant, portfolio manager of public investments at GuideStone Fund.

But what investors would really like is if fork in the road merges into one. That tends to be the safer path to take.

What you need to know today

The Dow Jones Industrial Average notches record. The 30-stock index climbed 0.68% Wednesday stateside to close above 48,000 for the first time. The S&P 500 was mostly flat and the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.26%. The pan-European Stoxx 600 gained 0.71%.

Anthropic to spend $50 billion on U.S. AI infrastructure. Custom data centers will be first built in Texas and New York and go live in 2026, with more locations to follow. The facilities will be developed with Fluidstack, an AI cloud platform.

U.S. October jobs and inflation data might not be released. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that part of the fallout of the government closure could be lasting damage to the government’s data collection ability. But analysts think otherwise.

U.S. House of Representatives heading toward a vote. The House on Wednesday night stateside cleared a procedural hurdle required before the vote could begin on a bill that would end the government shutdown. Voting is expected to happen as of publication time.

[PRO] This U.S. mining stock is a top play: CIO. U.K. fund Blue Whale Capital’s Stephen Yiu said macroeconomic concerns, such as the U.S. fiscal deficit and the weakness of the dollar, could support the stock.

And finally…

People walk by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on June 18, 2024 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Why private equity is stuck with ‘zombie companies’ it can’t sell

Private equity firms are facing a new reality: a growing crop of companies that can neither thrive nor die, lingering in portfolios like the undead.

These so-called “zombie companies” refer to businesses that aren’t growing, barely generate enough cash to service debt and are unable to attract buyers even at a discount. They are usually trapped on a fund’s balance sheet beyond its expected holding period.

— Lee Ying Shan

Technology

Firefly Aerospace shares jump 15% on strong revenues, boosted guidance

Published

7 hours ago

November 12, 2025

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Firefly Aerospace shares jump 15% on strong revenues, boosted guidance

Jason Kim, chief executive officer of Firefly Aerospace, center, during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Firefly Aerospace‘s stock surged 15% on Wednesday after the space technology company issued better-than-expected third-quarter results and lifted its guidance.

Revenues in the third quarter jumped nearly 38% to $30.8 million from $22.4 million in the year-ago period and nearly doubled from the previous quarter.

Firefly’s net loss totaled $140.4 million, or $1.50 per share. The company said net loss included costs tied to its IPO, foreign exchange and executive severance

The company also lifted its outlook for the year, saying it now expects revenues to range between $150 million and $158 million. That’s up from previous guidance in the range of $133 million and $145 million.

This is Firefly’s second quarterly report as a public company. Last quarter, shares slumped after it posted a bigger loss and lower revenues than analysts were expecting.

The Cedar Park, Texas, company went public on the Nasdaq in August during a period of heightened enthusiasm toward space technology. The U.S. government and NASA have leaned on more contracts with companies like Firefly and Elon Musk‘s SpaceX to support moon missions.

But shares of Firefly have lost 70% of their value since their opening day close, and the company’s market capitalization has plummeted from about $8.5 billion to about $2.7 billion on Wednesday.

In September, Firefly shares sank after a rocket exploded during a ground test at the company’s Texas facility, days after receiving clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration over a separate incident. Firefly has since put “corrective measures” in place, the company said on Wednesday. Shares dropped 35% in September and are down 24% this month.

Firefly in July won a nearly $177 million contract with NASA for an upcoming moon mission, and in October, it announced its acquisition of defense tech firm SciTec to boost its national security portfolio.