Details
- AWS and HUMAIN unveiled an expanded partnership during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum to launch the first "AI Zone" data center in Riyadh, set to deploy up to 150,000 AI accelerators.
- The project leverages NVIDIA’s advanced GB300 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, featuring 72 GPUs, 36 Grace CPUs, and delivering 1,440 PFLOPS FP4 performance per system, alongside AWS Trainium chips for powerful AI training and inference.
- HUMAIN has made AWS its preferred AI partner, providing access to Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and AgentCore for seamless management of leading foundation models.
- This expansion builds on a $5 billion investment pledged in May 2025 and aims to establish Saudi Arabia as a major global AI compute center, emphasizing the development of the ALLAM Arabic LLM.
- The initiative includes efforts to train 100,000 Saudi citizens in cloud and AI skills, with a dedicated program for upskilling 10,000 women, and aims to contribute $130 billion to Saudi Arabia’s GDP by 2030.
Impact
The AWS-HUMAIN partnership propels Saudi Arabia into the global AI spotlight, directly challenging regional ambitions by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Deploying such large-scale infrastructure and investing in local tech talent and linguistic AI brings the country closer to becoming a significant AI innovation hub outside of traditional power centers. This move underscores a growing shift toward localized AI leadership and expertise.
