HUMAIN, Cohere to build Arabic AI models
Cohere-HUMAIN deal targets sovereign AI models, 50MW compute
#SaudiArabia #sovereignAI - PIF-owned full-stack AI company HUMAIN and enterprise AI firm Cohere will jointly develop sovereign AI models, including Arabic-language and domain-adapted foundation models, alongside special-purpose models built for enterprise and sector-specific use cases. Announced during Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to the Kingdom, the model collaboration is underpinned by at least 50 megawatts of dedicated AI compute. It will mark Cohere’s first international compute expansion outside North America, with the infrastructure expected live by Q4 2027.
SO WHAT? - The deal is the first significant move by HUMAIN to partner with a large language model developer to build sovereign AI models for Saudi Arabia. To-date HUMAIN has been developing the ALLaM LLM model first built and launched by the SDAIA in 2023. The Saudi national AI company has been using ALLaM for internal needs, solutions development and as an on device model for its series of Horizon AI PCs. However, like other major AI solution providers in the region it is planning for a heterogeneous environment using different AI models for their different strengths. Today’s announcement is the first hint that new Arabic language sovereign AI models will be part of the mix.
KEY POINTS:
Saudi Arabia’s national AI company HUMAIN and Cohere, a Toronto-headquartered enterprise AI firm founded in 2019, will jointly develop sovereign AI models, including Arabic-language and domain-adapted foundation models.
The companies will also build special-purpose AI models tailored to enterprise and sector-specific use cases, drawing on each firm’s technology, technical expertise and intellectual property.
The agreement to jointly build new AI models is backed by at least 50 megawatts of dedicated AI compute capacity, which HUMAIN will designate to support Cohere’s next-generation foundation models, with room to scale over the next five years.
HUMAIN’s existing portfolio includes some of the largest Arabic large language models developed in the Arab world, alongside data centre and hyperscale infrastructure projects.
The announcement was made in at the Saudi-Canadian Investment Roundtable, during the visit of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to the Kingdom
The deal marks Cohere’s first international AI compute expansion outside North America, giving it access to what the companies call one of the region’s largest dedicated AI deployments.
The infrastructure is built for model research and development, reinforcement learning, inference optimisation and future research, and is expected to go live by Q4 2027.
The partnership also covers enterprise AI adoption across the region, combining Cohere’s security-focused enterprise tools with HUMAIN’s infrastructure to support productivity, knowledge management and customer engagement applications.
Cohere has raised more than $1.6 billion to date from investors including Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Oracle and Cisco, plus AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li.
HUMAIN, a PIF company building full-stack AI capabilities, and Cohere, a Toronto-headquartered enterprise AI firm founded in 2019, announced a strategic compute and model-development collaboration in Riyadh and Jeddah.
ZOOM OUT - The news was announced during the same week that Cohere released Transcribe Arabic, an open-source model based on the developers 2B frontier Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. Arabic is spoken natively by more than 300 million people across roughly 30 dialects, yet speech and language models have historically been trained overwhelmingly on English data, leaving tools like Whisper prone to flattening regional speech into Modern Standard Arabic. Cohere’s model is designed to capture the nuances and dialectical richness of Arabic, while being fit for enterprise speech applications. Transcribe Arabic was built to handle dialect variation, bilingual Arabic-English speech, code-switching, and domain-specific vocabulary.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: HUMAIN, Cohere
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