Humain is a Saudi Arabian state-backed company centralising the kingdom's artificial-intelligence data-centre efforts. It is chaired by Muhammad bin Salman. It became a national priority in May 2025. Its chief executive is Tareq Amin, who also runs Aramco Digital, the tech arm of Saudi Aramco. Amin was born in Jordan and previously worked on infrastructure projects for Reliance Jio, an Indian telecoms company, and Rakuten, a Japanese conglomerate.
Humain's strategy rests on Saudi Arabia's cheap electricity. The Al Shuaiba solar farm, two hours south of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast, blankets 50 square kilometres of desert. Its first phase, started in 2024, produces 600 megawatts at 3.9 Saudi halalas (just over one American cent) per kilowatt-hour—nearly a twentieth of the cost of generation at Britain's planned Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.
The cost of inference (the process of querying and getting answers from an AI system) is made up of the fixed cost of hardware and the ongoing cost of electricity. Since the newest, most expensive chips are usually more efficient, offering cheaper AI comes down to cheaper electricity. Humain was able to sell output tokens for around half market price.
In its first two weeks, Humain found more than 200 potential data-centre sites with access to a combined 15.6 gigawatts of energy supply, including four large plots next to sufficient solar power.
Humain's data-centre journey began with a deal between Aramco Digital and Groq, obtaining $1.5bn of Groq's semiconductors in February 2025. Those chips are designed specifically for inference workloads, suited to reducing the cost of producing tokens.
In November 2025, a visit to America by MBS included a meeting with Donald Trump which unlocked a licence to import 35,000 top-flight chips from Nvidia, costing around $1bn. That is not enough to fill more than a single data centre, but it was a reversal of earlier American attempts to keep the most valuable AI hardware available only to America's closest allies. AirTrunk, a data-centre builder, signed a $3bn deal with Humain to build a data-centre campus in the kingdom.
ALLAM, an Arabic-language AI model built with the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), has been provided to civil servants. Humain has signed deals with firms like Adobe to incorporate the model in their applications.
Amin talks of building a "world-first AI operating system for the enterprise"—a direct competitor to Microsoft Windows where departments such as human resources and legal are replaced by AI agents and the interface is built around prompting chatbots rather than clicking on icons.
I consider a new device or technology to have been culturally accepted when it has been used to commit a murder.