Humain receives first shipment of fast Nvidia AI chips

• AI company is backed by PIF
• Leading plans for Saudi data centres
• $18bn-24bn partnership with Nvidia

Humain has received a shipment of Nvidia’s latest artificial intelligence chips as the Public Investment Fund-backed company accelerates plans to build data centre capacity in Saudi Arabia.

Gulf states are pouring billions into AI infrastructure to diversify their economies, helped by a thaw in Washington’s approach to exporting advanced chips that followed President Donald Trump’s visit to the region.

“The first shipment of latest state-of-the-art Nvidia AI GPU chips have arrived,” Tareq Amin, CEO at Humain, wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday.

“The team will be fully focused on rapid deployment, ensuring everything is up and running before the start of the new year.”

The high-performance chips, known as graphics processing units or GPUs, process large amounts of data far more quickly than standard computer components.

Humain is building the data centres and compute – computing capacity needed to train and run AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – betting that cheap energy and state backing can help Saudi Arabia attract global customers.

US-based Nvidia, now worth over $4.5 trillion and the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, dominates the market for GPUs. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia are major buyers.

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Humain, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said in November it had expanded its partnership with Nvidia and plans to deploy up to 600,000 of its chips over the next three years.

Nvidia’s GPUs are priced at $30,000 to $40,000, so 600,000 units would cost roughly $18 billion to $24 billion.

The pace of Saudi Arabia’s rollout has led some industry watchers to predict that compute capacity could outstrip local demand in the short term, enabling it to market spare capacity abroad as global demand rises.

Mahesh Jaishankar, a senior adviser at consultancy Arthur D Little, told AGBI in May that the compute based on the number of chips being deployed “could be far more than the demand of the country. So the expectation is that they are going to have to export in some form.” 

Humain is also working with other partners to build capacity. 

It said in November that it would develop data centres in Saudi Arabia with Elon Musk’s xAI, anchored by a 500-megawatt facility, and that Amazon’s AWS would deploy and manage up to 150,000 Nvidia GPUs in a dedicated “AI Zone” in Riyadh.

At the Future Investment Initiative conference in October, Saudi investment minister Khalid Al Falih said the PIF was prioritising investment in AI and data centres powered by the country’s vast hydrocarbon and other energy resources.

Speaking at the same conference, Humain CEO Amin said state funding for AI ventures was readily available.

“Everything we ask for, we get,” he said.