To those who remember that dissident Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered within seven minutes of entering a Saudi Arabian consulate in 2019, the name of the kingdom’s AI fund may conjure up a dry chuckle. It’s called “HUMAIN” – and it just bought 18,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
Ancient history perhaps; no government is perfect (although monarchs personally ordering critics to be chopped into pieces remains at the “a little excessive” end of the political spectrum, low expectations and all.) And few would expect despots to be immune from the allure of AI.
But we're not here to right ancient wrongs, we're here to review a press release about a new partnership to fill a quick hole. Onwards!
“AI factories”
Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN is the AI subsidiary of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
It today (May 13) announced a major new partnership with NVIDIA that will “transform Saudi Arabia into a global powerhouse in AI, cloud and enterprise computing, digital twins, and robotics.” (“Blockchain” and “IoT” must have been chopped and flushed from this list of technology cliches.)
NVIDIA said the fund is making “a major investment to build AI factories powered by hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs over the next five years. NVIDIA will work with HUMAIN to train and empower an AI-ready workforce” as it continues to profit from sovereign AI FOMO.
500MW
HUMAIN is “making a major investment to build AI factories in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts powered by several hundred thousand of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs" it said.
Phase one of the five-year partnership entails a “18,000 NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer with NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.”
That’s good news for Saudi Arabia and NVIDIA. Arguably less good news for enterprises and cloud service providers already struggling to lay their hands on enough NVIDIA or AMD hardware to meet demand.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang saw it coming of course.
As he put it on the firm’s February 2025 Q4 earnings call: “The next wave is coming, agentic AI for enterprise, physical AI for robotics, and sovereign AI as different regions build out their AI for their own ecosystems."
Sovereign AI, of course, has benefits.
Here's Deloitte: "A Sovereign LLM can be designed to comply with local rules, to promote equity and inclusion as it relates to national or regional challenges, and to put national populations in charge of their own LLM destiny.
"Indeed, because they are trained on local data and can reflect legal frameworks in controllable borders, Sovereign LLMs can empower national or regional stakeholders to: align AI with domestic regulatory policies and industry sector standards; meet required Service Level Agreements and/or Operating Level Agreements for infrastructure, platforms and applications; and benefit from data protection and security measures across storage, network, and access."
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