Saudi Arabia’s national AI company, HUMAIN, is significantly increasing its presence in the United States through a new partnership with New York-based Global AI. This collaboration, announced at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, focuses on building sovereign AI infrastructure within the US and expanding globally. The move underscores HUMAIN’s growing investment in American operations despite its core mandate for Saudi Arabia.
Strategic Expansion into US AI Markets
The partnership will establish globally competitive AI data centers and compute services designed for enterprises, government entities, and AI model developers. Facilities will be engineered for high-density computing, supporting advanced AI workloads, large-scale model training, and secure inference operations. Key to this design is an air-gapped architecture, leveraging NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Ultraplatforms and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking as foundational compute capacity.
This is not HUMAIN’s first investment in US AI infrastructure. Just months earlier, the company entered a $10 billion joint venture with AMD to create a global AI hyperscaler. These moves signal a clear strategy to establish a major footprint in the US market.
Why This Matters: Saudi Arabia’s Tech Ambitions
The partnership reflects Saudi Arabia’s broader $1 trillion investment commitment to the US economy, with technology as a key priority. HUMAIN, as the nation’s AI arm, is positioned to spearhead these technology and digital infrastructure projects. This is a strategic play for global AI dominance, with Saudi Arabia aiming to become a third pillar of global AI infrastructure, alongside the US and China.
Key Features of the Infrastructure
The planned infrastructure will prioritize data sovereignty, offering strict isolation while providing access to cutting-edge hardware capabilities. It will cater to enterprise, public-sector, and AI model development partners, enabling model training, large-scale inference, and sovereign-cloud integration within locally governed ecosystems.
Global AI’s status as an NVIDIA Cloud Partner ensures access to NVIDIA reference architectures and support infrastructure while maintaining strict sovereign control over operations and data management. According to HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin, this expansion secures a strategic foothold for Saudi Arabia in the global AI landscape.
Global AI’s Role and Leadership
Co-founded by Dr. John E Kelly III (Chairman and CTO) and Sami Issa (Co-founder and CEO), Global AI specializes in deploying secure, locally governed compute environments. The company aims to balance data sovereignty with access to advanced AI capabilities, positioning itself as a key enabler of sovereign AI infrastructure in the US.
The partnership represents a significant step toward Saudi Arabia’s goal of becoming a major player in the global AI ecosystem, with the US serving as a critical base for expansion and innovation.
This expansion is not merely a business deal; it is a calculated move by Saudi Arabia to secure its position in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.
