#SaudiArabia #HPC - Saudi Arabia’s national AI company HUMAIN and Saudi Arabia research university KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) are exploring a collaboration to make KAUST’s Shaheen III supercomputer available through HUMAIN Cloud. Shaheen III, one of the world’s most powerful computers, would provide large-scale compute capacity for selected enterprises and researchers. The two organisations plan to target biotechnology, materials science, oil and gas, and manufacturing, though no definitive commercial agreement has yet been signed.
SO WHAT? - HUMAIN and KAUST aim to plug one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful research supercomputers into a commercial AI cloud platform. The deal could give local enterprises access to compute normally reserved for scientific institutions. For HUMAIN, still building out its sovereign cloud ambitions, it’s a shortcut to serious HPC capacity without having to build it from scratch. For KAUST, it’s both a way to utilise more of Shaheen III’s CPU compute capacity and potentially a route to commercial relevance for infrastructure. Nothing is signed yet, but the intent could lead to a new kind of commercial-academic collaboration in the Kingdom.
KEY POINTS:
HUMAIN and KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) are exploring a collaboration to make KAUST’s Shaheen III CPU-based supercomputer partition available as a compute resource within HUMAIN Cloud, HUMAIN’s planned AI cloud offering.
Shaheen III is an HPE Cray EX supercomputer consisting of two partitions: a CPU partition and a GPU-accelerated partition. The Shaheen III GPU partition is ranked 22nd globally in the Top500 list June 2026, while the Shaheen III CPU partition is ranked 64th in the Top500 list June 2026.
The collaboration would target compute-intensive domains including biotechnology, materials science, oil and gas, and manufacturing. There are also plans for industry blueprints and reference architectures on HUMAIN’s HPC-as-a-Service platform.
Access is intended for selected eligible enterprises and researchers, supporting data processing and analytics, scientific discovery, engineering simulation, and digital twins.
KAUST retains sole ownership and operational control of Shaheen III, and existing compute allocations for its own researchers remain unchanged.
KAUST has confirmed Shaheen III operates in compliance with applicable export control regulations and licence conditions.
As of the announcement, HUMAIN and KAUST have not entered into any agreement for the commercial supply of Shaheen III capacity. Any expanded access will depend on definitive agreements and regulatory approval.
HUMAIN is building full-stack AI capabilities spanning data centres, cloud infrastructure, AI models including Arabic large language models, and sector-specific AI solutions.
KAUST has been ranked the top university in the Arab world for three consecutive years by Times Higher Education.
ZOOM IN - Built by HPE on a direct liquid-cooled Cray EX architecture, Shaheen III runs as two systems in one. The supercomputer’s CPU partition holds 4,608 AMD Genoa (EPYC 9004 series) nodes, each with 192 cores and 384 GB of memory, delivering 35.6 PetaFlop/s of sustained performance. The system is ranked 64th in the June 2026 TOP500 global supercomputer list. Meanwhile, sitting alongside it is a GPU partition of 2,800 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, which hit 122.8 PetaFlop/s and is ranked 22nd in the June 2026 TOP500 (the fastest machine in the Middle East at the time of its installation). Together, the two partitions give KAUST both the CPU throughput for data-heavy workloads and the GPU power for large-scale AI training. Projects earmarked or the machine included Arabic language models, a digital twin of the Arabian Peninsula, materials discovery, and rare-disease diagnostics research.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: HUMAIN, KAUST
Read more about the Gulf’s supercomputers:
Core42’s HPC systems ranked 1 & 2 in region (Middle East AI News)
Core42’s SuperPOD region’s largest HPC system (Middle East AI News)
Aramco awards $372M HPC contract to Solutions by STC (Middle East AI News)
The Middle East’s most powerful supercomputer (Middle East AI News)