Saudi Arabia’s state-backed artificial intelligence company HUMAIN has unveiled a series of major developments that together underscore its ambition to build a full-stack AI ecosystem spanning data infrastructure, software, and industrial partnerships.
The firm, founded earlier this year by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced that Saudi Aramco will acquire a significant minority stake in the company while PIF retains majority ownership. The deal, disclosed via a non-binding term sheet, deepens the alignment between the Kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund and its energy giant as both seek to translate oil wealth into global technology leadership.
It also places Aramco’s industrial expertise alongside HUMAIN’s AI infrastructure push, positioning the company as a central vehicle in Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation under Vision 2030.
Alongside the equity reshuffle, HUMAIN revealed plans to develop roughly six gigawatts of data-centre capacity across the Kingdom, a scale that would make Saudi Arabia one of the world’s largest hubs for AI compute, and to launch a proprietary voice-controlled operating system called Humain One.
The OS, described by the company as “now you speak your intent,” is designed to enable users to interact with AI systems through natural speech, forming part of HUMAIN’s strategy to localise advanced technologies in Arabic and make them accessible across devices and services.
To support its infrastructure build-out, HUMAIN signed a partnership with AirTrunk, the hyperscale data-centre developer backed by Blackstone and Canada’s CPP Investments.
The collaboration, valued at around $3 billion, will finance, construct, and operate state-of-the-art data centres tailored for AI training and inference workloads, beginning with facilities in Riyadh and Dammam.
In parallel, HUMAIN reached an agreement with Qualcomm to co-develop AI data-centre and edge hardware, integrating the chipmaker’s new accelerators into its upcoming campuses. The partnership gives HUMAIN access to one of the world’s leading silicon providers as it seeks to establish sovereign compute capacity within Saudi borders while ensuring regulatory compliance with U.S. export frameworks.
The company has indicated that the first phases of its data-centre projects will go live in 2026, providing the foundation for large-scale model training and sovereign compute.
At the same time, HUMAIN’s collaboration with Aramco is expected to accelerate adoption of AI across energy and industrial sectors, extending into logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing.
With Qualcomm providing chip-level expertise and AirTrunk anchoring infrastructure delivery, HUMAIN appears to be closing the loop on the full AI stack, from hardware to software to industrial deployment.
