Elon Musk’s xAI will be first customer for Nvidia-backed data center in Saudi Arabia
Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) talks with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 19, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
Nvidia and xAI said on Wednesday that a large data center facility being built in Saudi Arabia and equipped with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips will count Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup as its first customer.
Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were both in attendance at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C.
The announcement builds on a partnership from May, when Nvidia said it would provide Saudi Arabia’s Humain with chips that use 500 megawatts of power. On Wednesday, Humain said the project would include about 600,000 Nvidia graphics processing units.
Humain was launched earlier this year and is owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. The plan to build the data center was initially announced when Huang visited Saudi Arabia alongside President Donald Trump.
“Could you imagine, a startup company approximately 0 billion dollars in revenues, now going to build a data center for Elon,” Huang said.
The facility is one of the most prominent examples of what Nvidia calls “sovereign AI.” The chipmaker has said that nations will increasingly need to build data centers for AI in order to protect national security and their culture. It’s also a potentially massive market for Nvidia’s pricey AI chips beyond a handful of hyperscalers.
Huang’s appearance at an event supported by President Trump is another sign of the administration’s focus on AI. Huang has become friendly with the president as Nvidia lobbies to gain licenses to ship future AI chips to China.
When announcing the agreement, Musk, who was a major figure in the early days of the second Trump administration, briefly mixed up the size of the data center, which is measured in megawatts, a unit of power. He joked that plans for a data center that would be 1,000 times larger would have to wait.
“That will be eight bazillion, trillion dollars,” Musk joked.
Humain won’t just use Nvidia chips. Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm will also sell chips and AI systems to Humain. AMD CEO Lisa Su and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon both attended a state dinner on Tuesday to honor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
AMD will provide chips that may require as much as 1 gigawatt of power by 2030. The company said the chips that it would provide are its Instinct MI450 GPUs for AI. Cisco will provide additional infrastructure for the data center, AMD said.
Qualcomm will sell Humain its new data center chips that were first revealed in October, called the AI200 and AI250. Humain will deploy 200 megawatts of Qualcomm chips, the company said.
WATCH: Qualcomm CEO on new AI chips
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Air taxi maker Joby Aviation in a new lawsuit accused competitor Archer Aviation of using stolen information by a former employee to “one-up” a partnership deal with a real estate developer.
“This is corporate espionage, planned and premeditated,” Joby said in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California Superior Court in Santa Cruz, where the company is based.
Archer and Joby did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that former U.S. state and local policy lead, George Kivork, downloaded dozens of files and sent some content to his personal email two days before he resigned in July to take a job at Archer, which had recruited him.
By August, Joby said a partner that worked with Kivork said it had been approached by Archer with a “more lucrative deal.” Joby alleges that the eVTOL rival’s understanding of “highly confidential” details helped it leverage negotiations.
Joby also said the developer attempted to terminate the agreement, citing a breach of confidentiality.
Kivork refused to return the files when Joby approached him after conducting an investigation, according to the suit. The company also said Archer denied wrongdoing, and would not disclose how it learned about the terms of the agreement or provide results from an internal investigation it allegedly undertook.
The lawsuit comes during a busy period for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) technology as companies race to gain Federal Aviation Administration certification to start flying commercially. ‘
The sector has also benefitted from President Donald Trump‘s newly minted eVTOL pilot program.
Joby argued in the complaint that it’s “imperative” to protect Joby’s work “from this type of espionage” to promote the sector’s success and ensure fair competition.
Last week, Joby said it completed its first test flight for a hybrid aircraft it’s working on with defense contractor L3Harris. This month, Amazon-backed Beta Technologies, another electric flight company, also went public on the New York Stock Exchange.
Joby shares have more than doubled over the last year, while Archer is up about 68%.
In August 2023, Archer settled a previous legal dispute with Boeing-owned Wisk Aero over the alleged theft of trade secrets. As part of the deal, Archer agreed to use Wisk as its autonomous tech partner.
A hearing is scheduled for March 20, 2026.
Joby and Archer year-to-date stock chart.
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