Elon Musk has announced that xAI will build a 500-megawatt data centre in Saudi Arabia, marking one of the region’s most significant investments in AI infrastructure to date. The project, unveiled on Wednesday during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s official visit to the United States, will be developed in partnership with HUMAIN AI, a company backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.
The facility will run on Nvidia’s computing chips and will represent a step change in xAI’s compute capacity. For comparison, xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, currently one of the largest operating clusters globally, has around 300 megawatts of computing power.
In a separate announcement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that Amazon Web Services will develop a 100-megawatt GPU data centre, with a “gigawatt ambition and counting,” also powered by Nvidia hardware.
The developments follow the signing of an AI Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, which the White House described as giving the kingdom access to “world-leading American systems while protecting US technology from foreign influence.”
Sharing the stage with Huang and Saudi communications minister Abdullah Alswaha, Musk outlined a future shaped by advanced robotics and off-planet compute clusters. He predicted widespread adoption of humanoid robots and said solar-powered AI satellites could become the lowest-cost compute option within four to five years.
He briefly misstated the data centre’s power level as 500 gigawatts before correcting himself, joking that such a project would require “8 bazillion trillion dollars.”
