Faisal Salisu DambattaSaudi Arabia is continuing to strengthen its ties with major American AI companies, announcing new agreements worth billions of dollars. This comes as the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, makes his first visit to the United States in years.
Humain, an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced a series of new partnerships with leading American tech companies, including xAI, Cisco, AMD, and Qualcomm, at the U.S.-Saudi investment forum held in Washington on Wednesday.
The move reflects Saudi Arabia’s effort to deepen relations with the United States and shift its economy away from oil. For American AI companies, Saudi Arabia provides solutions to three major challenges: funding, space, and affordable energy.
At the forum, Elon Musk announced that xAI, his AI company, will build a large data center in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Humain. The planned 500-megawatt center will be xAI’s largest facility outside the United States and will allow the deployment of xAI’s Grok chatbot across Saudi Arabia.
The future of intelligence will be built through massive computing power combined with advanced AI models,Musk said.
The center will use Nvidia chips, and its founder, Jensen Huang, attended the discussion alongside Musk and Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Abdullah Alswaha. No further details about the partnership were released.
This is how we turn words into action in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with the U.S.,Alswaha said. Yesterday, the President and His Royal Highness announced the AI strategic framework. Today, we are expanding further with Elon and Jensen.
During his visit to the White House on Wednesday, Crown Prince bin Salman stated that Saudi Arabia will invest $1 trillion in the United States—a significant increase from the previously announced $600 billion in May. The announcement reportedly took President Donald Trump by surprise.
You are telling me now that $600 billion will become $1 trillion?” Trump said. Good. I like that very much.
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