Saudi Arabia’s national AI company HUMAIN has already sold out capacity at its existing and planned data centres, just weeks after launching its flagship ALLaM 34B Arabic large language model and HUMAIN Chat application, according to Semafor.
Only 1% of HUMAIN’s compute customers are based inside Saudi Arabia. The overwhelming majority of demand comes from overseas enterprises tapping into the firm’s inferencing infrastructure. HUMAIN, backed by the Public Investment Fund and launched earlier this year, operates what it calls the world’s largest AI inferencing hub through a partnership with US chipmaker Groq.
The company has laid out an aggressive roadmap, targeting an expansion from 1.9 gigawatts of capacity by 2030 to 6 gigawatts by 2034. That scale would put HUMAIN among the most ambitious AI infrastructure builders globally, rivaling US and Chinese hyperscalers.
Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson has cautioned that the Kingdom risks repeating China’s experience, where huge investments in data centre capacity ran ahead of the availability of local talent and software ecosystems. Without a deep domestic developer base and robust AI applications, she warned, Saudi Arabia could face a scenario where vast computing resources remain underutilised.
