#SaudiArabia #LEAP5 - Saudi national AI firm HUMAIN plans to raise $2.5 billion from global and domestic investors to start a fund dedicated to data centre investment in Saudi Arabia, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. According to the news agency, the fund will help finance 250 megawatts of data centre capacity that HUMAIN is building and will be managed by Riyadh-based investment bank BSF Capital. The AI group signed a 12-month data centre design and build contract with Riyadh-based technology firm Al Moammar Information Systems Co. earlier this year, worth an estimated $501 million. HUMAIN plans to bring 1GW of data centre capacity online by 2027.
SO WHAT? - The funding news provides further evidence that Saudi Arabia’s push to build sovereign AI infrastructure is moving from state-backed financing toward private capital markets. HUMAIN has already secured up to $1.2 billion from the National Infrastructure Fund and drawn investment interest from Blackstone and BlackRock. A dedicated fund mixing debt and equity, pending Capital Market Authority approval, suggests HUMAIN wants a repeatable financing vehicle for scaling data centres rather than one-off deals. That puts Saudi Arabia in direct competition for the same global capital chasing data centre deals in the US and globally.
KEY POINTS:
HUMAIN is planning to raise $2.5 billion from global and domestic investors as an initial investment in a new fund aimed to back its Saudi data centre build-out, according to Bloomberg reporting. The news agency cited ‘people familiar with the matter’, although the company hasn’t confirmed the figure publicly.
Bloomberg reported that the fund will be managed by Riyadh-based investment bank BSF Capital, which will approach investors once it secures approval from Saudi Arabia’s Capital Market Authority, a process expected to take two to three months.
Financing could combine both debt and equity giving HUMAIN flexibility in how it structures capital across its expanding data centre portfolio.
The initial $2.5 billion will help finance 250 megawatts of data centre capacity that HUMAIN is building in partnership with Riyadh-based technology firm Al Moammar Information Systems Co., with room to expand toward 1GW.
HUMAIN signed a 12-month data centre design and build contract worth an estimated 1.88 billion Saudi riyals ($501 million) with MIS earlier this year.
Humain CEO Tareq Amin confirmed plans to launch a fund earlier this week during LEAP 2026 but gave no details on size, leaving Bloomberg’s reporting as the first indication of scale.
The fund forms part of a wider 6 gigawatt hyperscale AI data centre network HUMAIN is developing across Saudi Arabia, anchored by a 24 square kilometre campus at Al Sa’ad in east Riyadh.
Construction at Al Sa’ad began in March 2026, with HUMAIN saying the first phase, covering two of six 1GW plots, will deliver 1GW of capacity by or in 2027.
In January, HUMAIN secured a financing agreement worth up to $1.2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s National Infrastructure Fund, covering non-binding terms for up to 250 megawatts of AI data centre capacity.
Bloomberg reported in September 2025 that US private equity firms Blackstone Inc. and BlackRock Inc. were both in preliminary talks to commit billions of dollars to HUMAIN’s data centre and infrastructure plans.
ZOOM OUT - HUMAIN's $2.5 billion fund is a small piece of a much bigger build-out. The company has signed deals with AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Cisco, xAI and Together AI since May 2025, targeting 6 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2030. Its AMD tie-up alone is worth $10 billion, and Nvidia's deal covers several hundred thousand GPUs over five years. HUMAIN already runs live infrastructure with AMD and Cisco, has launched an Nvidia-powered AI cloud serving Saudi government clients, and has fresh sites underway with DataVolt, center3 and Together AI. The fund suggests Riyadh now wants private capital to help carry that load alongside its sovereign wealth funding.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: Bloomberg, HUMAIN, MEAIN
Read more HUMAIN data centre news:
Together AI and HUMAIN partner on 250MW Saudi centre (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN launches AI Cloud on NVIDIA Blackwell (Middle East AI News)
Adobe moves AI workloads to HUMAIN’s Qualcomm hub (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN, DataVolt break ground on NEOM AI facility (Middle East AI News)
Largest AMD inference cluster outside the US goes live (Middle East AI News)