HUMAIN says planned $10B global VC fund could be larger, unveils separate Saudi-focused vehicle

Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN says the $10 billion AI venture fund it first outlined last year could launch at an even larger size before the end of 2026, after a series of investments including a $3 billion bet on Elon Musk’s xAI.

CEO Tareq Amin told Semafor that the fund’s ambitions have expanded significantly and that it will have offices in Saudi Arabia, the US, France and the UK. It “will be really large as we want to be able to accelerate the pace of investment,” he said.

FWDstart first reported on the planned fund in May 2025, weeks after HUMAIN itself was launched by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Then targeting $10 billion, HUMAIN Ventures was expected to launch that summer and invest across the US, Europe and Asia, with Amin saying the company was in talks with OpenAI, xAI and Andreessen Horowitz.

Its largest disclosed investment has come through xAI’s $20 billion Series E, when HUMAIN invested $3 billion shortly before SpaceX acquired Elon Musk’s AI company in February. Its holding subsequently converted into SpaceX shares, making HUMAIN a significant minority shareholder in Musk’s space company. Amin described the investment to Semafor as a “home run.”

The planned fund will go beyond taking passive stakes. HUMAIN intends to back companies that commit to running some of their compute workloads through Saudi data centres or bringing staff into the Kingdom.

“We don’t do passive investments, that will never happen,” Amin told Semafor.

That approach is already visible in HUMAIN’s investment in Luma AI. HUMAIN led the video generation company’s $900 million Series C last November, while Luma simultaneously agreed to become a customer of Project Halo, HUMAIN’s planned two-gigawatt Saudi AI supercluster for model training and deployment.

The xAI relationship follows a similar pattern. Alongside its equity investment, HUMAIN and xAI agreed last year to jointly develop more than 500 megawatts of AI data centre and compute infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and deploy Grok models in the Kingdom.

HUMAIN Ventures has also begun investing closer to home. The company took an undisclosed stake in Saudi enterprise AI company MOZN last month, followed this week by investments in Arabic.AI and Tarjama, which will combine their Arabic language and document intelligence technology with HUMAIN’s locally operated compute, models and infrastructure.

Explaining the latter deal this week, Amin said HUMAIN Ventures is “not only looking at the obvious, crowded AI markets,” but at areas where AI can unlock significant productivity and companies have a defensible advantage.

In Arabic.AI and Tarjama’s case, he pointed in particular to the language data accumulated over years of operating across Arabic and English.

“Models will continue to change. They will become smaller, faster, cheaper and more capable. But high-quality, domain-specific data accumulated over years is much harder to replicate,” Amin wrote. “That is the moat.”

There is also a sovereignty component to the investment thesis. HUMAIN Translate, the product being developed through the Arabic.AI and Tarjama partnership, will run entirely on HUMAIN infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, including its models, inference and cloud infrastructure.

“Nothing needs to leave Saudi Arabia,” Amin wrote.

Amin also told Semafor that HUMAIN will create HUMAIN Limitless, a separate initiative specifically focused on investing in and supporting AI companies within Saudi Arabia. Its size and structure have not yet been disclosed.

The investment strategy sits alongside HUMAIN’s much larger infrastructure buildout. The company is targeting six gigawatts of AI data centre capacity in Saudi Arabia by 2034 and has secured a 16-gigawatt power commitment from the Saudi Ministry of Energy. Amin said its compute is currently around 30% cheaper for customers than elsewhere globally.