Saudi Arabia's big investment in AI, data centers, cloud services (www.cnn.com)

Saudi Arabia has doubled down on an audacious AI and cloud bet through Humain, a sovereign-wealth-fund–backed operator unveiled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. At the Future Investment Initiative Humain’s CEO Tareq Amin outlined plans to build up to six gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2034, announced a $3 billion Blackstone deal to construct facilities, and revealed strategic partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, AWS, Qualcomm and Cisco. Humain also launched Humain One, a voice- and text-first AI “operating system,” and says it already runs HR, finance, legal and IT internally with AI agents—reducing its payroll team to a single person. The move is significant because it signals a state-scale push to make Saudi Arabia the world’s third-largest AI market after the U.S. and China, leveraging the Kingdom’s cheap, abundant energy to accelerate compute-heavy model training and inference (Amin claims infrastructure advantages that cut deployment time by ~18 months). Technical and geopolitical implications include rapid onshoreization of cloud and model-hosting capabilities, deep vendor ties with chip and cloud leaders, and regional competition with the UAE’s G42 “Stargate” initiative. For the AI community this means more large-scale compute capacity, new datasets and regulatory influence emerging from the Middle East—and intensified commercial rivalry over talent, partnerships and who hosts next-generation LLMs.