Saudi Arabia announced AI development deals with four leading U.S. technology firms, chip companies NVIDIA and AMD, networking company Cisco and cloud platform Amazon Web Services.
The partnerships were formed through the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund’s AI subsidiary, HUMAIN.
With Nvidia, HUMAIN will build a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts of AI infrastructuure powered by several hundred thousand of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs over the next five years. The first phase of deployment will be an 18,000 NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer with NVIDIA InfiniBand networking.
As part of HUMAIN’s agreement with AMD, the parties will invest up to $10 billion to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the next five years.
With Cisco, it will partner with HUMAIN AI enterprise to power AI infrastructure and ecosystem growth, with new investments in research, talent and digital skills aim to accelerate AI in Saudi Arabia and to support “Vision 2030 by advancing Saudi Arabia’s transformation into a leading, diversified digital economy.”
With AWS, HUMAIN announced plans to invest $5 billion-plus in a partnership to build an “AI Zone” in the kngdom, bringing together dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers, UltraCluster networks for AI training and inference, AWS services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as Amazon Q to advance Saudi Arabia’s mission to be a world leader in AI.
Of the agreement with NVIDIA, the company and HUMAIN said, “The partnership underscores HUMAIN’s mission to position Saudi Arabia as an international AI powerhouse — combining cutting-edge infrastructure, frontier AI models, immersive digital platforms and human capital development.. These hyperscale AI data centers will provide a secure foundational infrastructure for training and deploying sovereign AI models at scale, enabling industries across Saudi Arabia and worldwide to accelerate innovation and digital transformation.”
HUMAIN said it will deploy the NVIDIA Omniverse platform as a multi-tenant system for physical AI and robotics through simulation, optimization and operation of physical environments by new human-AI-led solutions. The intent is to allow such industries as manufacturing, logistics and energy to create integrated digital twins, boosting efficiency, safety and sustainability for “Industry 4.0.”
The partnership will include collaborate on up-skilling and training programs, providing Saudi citizens and developers with experience in advanced AI, simulation, robotics and digital twin technologies. “This effort will contribute to building a robust national AI ecosystem and align with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goals of economic diversification and digital leadership,” HU MAIN said.
“AI, like electricity and internet, is essential infrastructure for every nation,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with HUMAIN, we are building AI infrastructure for the people and companies of Saudi Arabia to realize the bold vision of the kingdom.”
The collaboration with AMD will combine the kingdom’s energy resources, AI-ready workforce and forward-looking national AI policies with the AMD AI stack including: AMD Instinct GPUs, EPYC CPUs, Pensando DPUs for programmable networking, Ryzen AI for on-device AI compute to the edge and the ROCm open software ecosystem with support for all AI frameworks (PyTorch, SGLang, etc.)
The AI superstructure built by AMD and HUMAIN will be open, accessible at scale, and optimized to power AI workloads across enterprise, start-up and sovereign markets. HUMAIN will oversee end-to-end delivery, including hyperscale data center, sustainable power systems, and global fiber interconnects, and AMD will provide the full spectrum of the AMD AI compute portfolio and the AMD ROCm™ open software ecosystem.
“This is not just another infrastructure play – it’s an open invitation to the world’s innovators,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “We are democratizing AI at the compute level, ensuring that access to advanced AI is limited only by imagination, not by infrastructure.”
Cisco said today’s announcements follow CEO Chuck Robbins’ visit to Saudia Arabia two years ago when he met with HRH the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, and Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel’s participation today in the visit by President Trump to Saudi Arabia.
Cisco said it offers:
- AI-Ready infrastructure with advanced silicon and AI solutions including its Nexus, Nexus HyperFabric and UCS technologies, Cisco’s platform for scalable workloads.
- Cisco securiity solutions help organizations protect AI applications, data and models.
- A vendor-agnostic approach to integrate with local and global partners across the AI ecosystem.
H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said, “We thank Cisco for its continued partnership and commitment to the Kingdom. This investment marks a major step forward in scaling world-class AI infrastructure, accelerating innovation, and advancing a thriving AI economy led by Saudi talent, while reinforcing the Kingdom’s position as a leading hub for AI in the region and beyond.”
