Saudi forms AI-focused $10B joint venture with AMD
AMD forms unique venture with Kingdom's new AI company HUMAIN
#SaudiArabia #EXCLUSIVE - In one of its first major deals, Saudi Arabia's new national AI company HUMAIN has formed a groundbreaking $10 billion joint venture with US AI infrastructure firm AMD to create a global AI hyperscaler. The multi-year partnership will begin with the rollout of 50 megawatts (MW) of computing power by Q4 2025, and scale to at least 500MW over the next five years. The unique collaboration, which also includes networking giant Cisco, will establish data centres initially in Saudi Arabia before expanding globally, starting with the United States.
With AMD and HUMAIN teams working side-by-side, the new joint venture will leverage AMD’s full spectrum computing stack, open architecture and global presence. "This AI joint venture opens a new chapter in sovereign AI,” explained Keith Strier, AMD's Senior Vice President of Global AI Markets in an exclusive interview with Middle East AI News. “In order to meet the compute demands of digital economies, nations will look to create deeper partnerships with novel deal structures. This is the new reality. HUMAIN is forging the way forward to Sovereign AI 2.0."
SO WHAT? - The innovative deal could signal a new phase in sovereign AI development, where nations move beyond purchasing technology to forming strategic partnerships with global technology players. Joint AMD-HUMAIN teams are currently working on implementation plans that combine AMD CPUs, GPUs and its RoCm software stack. The new Saudi venture will be able to serve sovereign, enterprise and AI lab customers on a global scale.
For Saudi Arabia, the deal not only secures access to advanced AI infrastructure but positions the Kingdom as a future net exporter of AI compute. For AMD, the ambitious joint venture validates its roadmap and accelerates demand for multiple generations of its processors.
Here are the key points about this new joint venture:
Saudi Arabia's new national AI company HUMAIN has partnered with AMD in a groundbreaking $10 billion joint venture to build a global AI hyperscaler using AMD's full-spectrum computing platform, including silicon and software. The agreement includes Cisco as a partner and will build infrastructure both within Saudi Arabia and internationally.
The news was announced during U.S. President Tump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia on the sidelines of the Saudi-US Investment Forum. AMD CEO Lisa Su and CEO of the newly formed HUMAIN Tareq Amin were both in attendance.
The AMD-HUMAIN partnership begins with the deployment of 50MW of computing power by Q4 2025, will scale up to a minimum of 500MW over the following five-years, and is on track to activate multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026. The deal is a first-of-its-kind public private sector partnership between a sovereign nation and a global AI infrastructure firm.
Unlike previous sovereign AI initiatives that focused on purchasing hardware, this collaboration creates an entirely new entity that will be Saudi-based, but globally focused. The companies will collaborate not just on implementation but on developing commercial propositions to serve worldwide markets, including the United States.
The new venture will use AMD's full spectrum compute stack, including CPUs, GPUs and its RoCm software. The partnership aligns with Saudi Arabia's policy of promoting "silicon diversity" to ensure resilience and innovation in the local AI ecosystem. Deals with Nvidia and Groq validate this policy.
The venture leverages Saudi Arabia's advantages in data centre investments, energy production and progressive AI policies.
The JV will serve both commercial and government users in Saudi while also targeting international AI labs and startups.
AMD, which announced its new Riyadh office in February at LEAP25, will contribute global resources, including technology and expertise. The joint venture is expected to create hundreds of new jobs and thousands of indirect jobs in both Saudi Arabia and globally.
Keith Strier, AMD's Senior Vice President of Global AI Markets, described the partnership as "so unique it is likely to inspire a new wave of public and private sector sovereign AI collaborations across the world."
The parties expect to announce more details about the joint venture in the coming weeks.
TECH STACK - AMD’s full-spectrum AI stack includes:
AMD Instinct™ GPUs, with industry-leading memory and inference performance.
AMD EPYC™ CPUs, offering world-class compute density and energy efficiency.
AMD Pensando™ DPUs, enabling scalable, secure, and programmable networking.
AMD Ryzen™ AI, bringing on-device AI compute to the edge.
AMD ROCm open software ecosystem with built-in support for all AI frameworks (PyTorch, SGLang, etc.)
ZOOM OUT - The new $10 billion AMD joint venture follows the unveiling of HUMAIN, the Kingdom's new artificial intelligence powerhouse, owned by the Public Investment Fund (PIF). Announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman yesterday, HUMAIN will operate across the entire AI value chain.
The new AI company has been been designed to deliver full-stack AI capabilities across four core areas: next-generation data centers, hyper-performance infrastructure and cloud platforms, advanced multimodal LLMs (including Arabic models), and transformative AI Solutions that combine deep sector insight with real-world execution.
According to Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN the AMD joint venture “is not just another infrastructure play - it’s an open invitation to the world’s innovators. We are democratising AI at the compute level, ensuring that access to advanced AI is limited only by imagination, not by infrastructure.”
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Read more about the launch of HUMAIN:
Saudi Arabia creates AI powerhouse (Middle East AI News)