Saudi Arabia’s AI ambition, and what it means for the United States

A day before Air Force One touched down in Riyadh to kick off US President Donald Trump’s three-country tour of the Gulf, Saudi Arabia made a pivotal announcement. The kingdom, long synonymous with oil, revealed a major investment in artificial intelligence (AI) through its newly launched company, HumAIn. This pivot, explicitly timed to coincide with Trump’s visit starting on May 13, and in anticipation of the signing of multiple tech deals between US and Gulf firms during the trip, signaled a profound shift in US-Saudi relations — from a traditional oil-for-security alliance to a partnership centered on AI and digital infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia’s AI ambition is anchored in Vision 2030, the country’s strategy for economic diversification and social reform. Unveiled in 2016, Vision 2030 aims inter alia to reduce the kingdom’s dependency on oil, which has historically accounted for more than 40% of its GDP and 80% of export revenue. In place of petroleum exports, Riyadh envisions a digital economy powered by AI — positioning the kingdom as a global hub for compute infrastructure, the essential backbone for training models and powering inference at scale. Saudi Arabia’s strategy is to become the prime backend provider of compute-as-a-service for emerging markets across Africa and Asia.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund with over $900 billion in assets under management, has already allocated more than $40 billion to AI-related ventures, including HumAIn, which serves as the flagship platform for national AI infrastructure. But unlike other national programs to develop this future-looking sector, Saudi Arabia’s bet is not just on models and software. It is investing heavily in the physical underpinnings of AI: energy, data centers, semiconductors, and connectivity. “AI will consume a lot of energy,” PIF Governor Yasir al-Rumayyan noted at the launch. “And we are the global leader when it comes to fossil fuel energy and renewable energy.”

Indeed, energy is where Saudi Arabia holds a unique comparative advantage. As the world grapples with the escalating power demands of AI training and inference, the kingdom’s abundant oil, expanding renewable energy sector, and potential civilian nuclear program offer scalable, cost-effective infrastructure for compute. It is no coincidence that energy-rich countries are becoming compute-rich ones.

Shift in priorities backed up by investment

HumAIn’s partnership with the American technology company Qualcomm, formalized during Trump’s visit, is one of the most important outcomes of the Saudi pivot toward AI development and cooperation with the US in this sphere. The two firms have agreed to co-develop AI data centers, build a design center for semiconductor technology, and integrate HumAIn’s Arabic large language models (LLMs) with the ecosystem of AI edge devices powered by Qualcomm. At the granular level, this means Saudi Arabia’s own LLM, ALLaM, will be integrated into Qualcomm's ecosystem, expanding the reach of Saudi-generated Arabic-language AI and positioning the kingdom as a regional leader in AI content, which is becoming increasingly foundational to soft power and cultural influence.

Beyond Qualcomm, HumAIn is assembling a network of strategic partnerships. A deal with chip-maker NVIDIA includes plans to build AI factories with 500 megawatts of computing capacity in the kingdom, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing over $5 billion to develop an “AI Zone” — a dedicated cluster of data centers optimized for training and deploying AI systems at scale — in Saudi Arabia, complete with hyperscale data centers and cloud infrastructure tailored to high-performance computing.

Together, these moves aim to position Saudi Arabia not just as a tech adopter but as a global backend for AI — a compute hub for emerging markets in Africa and Asia. Crucially, the timing of HumAIn’s launch, which coincided with President Trump’s high-profile Gulf tour, was no accident. It reflected an effort to anchor US-Saudi tech relations in AI and digital infrastructure, rather than the energy-for-security framework. The deals announced during the visit, including DataVolt’s $20 billion US data center investment, illustrate a shift toward the types of reciprocal technology and capital flows that are the building blocks of a modern techno-industrial partnership.

New direction for bilateral relations

That transformation is not purely economic; it is deeply strategic. In a world fractured by US-China tech competition, the Gulf has emerged as a swing region in the global AI race. While China has made overtures to Gulf capitals through infrastructure projects and digital platforms, the AI stack being built in Saudi Arabia — leveraging US firms, standards, and chips — signals a willingness to align more closely with Washington. This alignment is not guaranteed. It requires sustained engagement, modernization of export controls, and investment frameworks supporting long-term Gulf capital flows into the US tech ecosystem. In that sense, these deals announced in Riyadh are a test of whether the US can bring more rising AI powers into the US-led AI ecosystem.

In many ways, Saudi Arabia’s AI ambition reflects a broader trend across the Gulf: the rise of techno-industrial statecraft. Whether it is the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign AI champion G42 or Qatar’s AI infrastructure projects, the region is no longer content with being a theater for the deployment of external actors’ AI applications — it wants to become a swing player in the global AI ecosystem.

 

Mohammed Soliman is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he explores the policy challenges associated with the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and trade in the Middle East and emerging markets.

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