HUMAIN starts IPO preparations 16 months after launch, with revenues still undisclosed

Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN has seemingly begun assembling a team to prepare for an eventual IPO, little more than a year after the PIF-backed AI company was created to build across data centres, cloud infrastructure, models and applications.

CEO Tareq Amin posted over the weekend on LinkedIn that he was recruiting people with experience in finance, strategy and IPO preparation who could understand HUMAIN’s financials and “turn complexity into a powerful investor story”. The company has not appointed banks for an offering or announced a valuation, transaction size or listing date.

Nor does the recruitment appear to bring forward HUMAIN’s existing timetable. Amin said last October that he expected the company ultimately to list in both Saudi Arabia and on Nasdaq within three to four years, putting a potential offering around 2029. The latest preparations remain preliminary rather than the start of a formal IPO process.

What HUMAIN would actually ask public investors to value is less clear.

Despite announcing tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure plans, investments and partnerships since its May 2025 launch, HUMAIN has yet to publicly disclose revenue, EBITDA or profit figures. FWDstart could also find no breakdown of revenue by customer or geography.

There is evidence that parts of the business have begun generating commercial demand.

HUMAIN launched its Nvidia-powered AI cloud last week with 1.1MW of operational capacity and said utilisation already exceeded 90%. The Saudi Ministry of Commerce is among its first named customers, while AMD and Cisco separately said infrastructure developed with HUMAIN is now live and serving customers “in the Kingdom and beyond”. Neither announcement disclosed revenue or customer pricing.

Amin has gone further, telling Semafor that HUMAIN’s capacity is being contracted before it is deployed.

“My entire capacity is sold before it’s deployed,” he said, adding that HUMAIN is using offtake agreements with large technology companies to raise debt against predictable future revenue.

The more important question for an eventual IPO is where those revenues come from.

So far, some of HUMAIN’s clearest external demand is tied to companies it has simultaneously invested in or partnered with. Luma AI, whose $900 million Series C HUMAIN led last year, contracted to buy the entire initial 100MW of an AMD-Cisco-HUMAIN data centre venture and is set to become a customer of the much larger Project Halo cluster.

Together AI potentially provides an even larger outside revenue stream. The US AI cloud company agreed last week to use 250MW of HUMAIN capacity, with the companies expecting the project to generate more than $5 billion in gross annualised revenue during its first operating year. The companies have not disclosed how that revenue would be divided, how much is contracted rather than projected, or what portion would ultimately appear on HUMAIN’s income statement.

Other routes are less mature. HUMAIN and Microsoft are targeting one million users across the Middle East and Africa for a bundle combining HUMAIN ONE with Microsoft 365 Copilot, while its xAI relationship includes plans for more than 500MW of Saudi compute. Neither has disclosed the commercial terms or expected revenue flowing to HUMAIN.

That distinction will matter if HUMAIN eventually follows through with a listing.

The closest regional analogue is arguably Abu Dhabi’s Presight, another state-backed AI company that went public while trying to turn a large domestic government business into a more international one.

Presight was considerably further along financially when it listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange in 2023. The G42-controlled company entered the market with $423 million of annual revenue and $148 million of net profit, raising $496 million in an IPO that was 136 times oversubscribed.

But the provenance of that revenue attracted scrutiny. About 82% of Presight’s 2022 sales came from related parties, including business classified through its relationship with the Abu Dhabi government. The proportion had been almost 100% a year earlier.

Presight has subsequently started proving that the model can travel. Revenue reached AED 3.03 billion last year, with AED 1.17 billion, or 38.5%, generated outside the UAE, up from 23% a year earlier.

HUMAIN has time to build a similar record.

Its existing public-market target still sits several years away, while much of the infrastructure announced during its first 16 months remains under construction or at an early stage of operation. The company is simultaneously looking beyond PIF for capital, including plans for an initial $2.5 billion data-centre investment vehicle, after securing up to $1.2 billion of infrastructure financing earlier this year. Its expansion so far has combined operational launches with projects that remain under development.

By the time HUMAIN reaches public markets, the number of gigawatts it has announced is unlikely to be enough of an investment case on its own.

The numbers investors will ultimately need are considerably more conventional: how much revenue the company is generating, what margins it earns on that compute, how much capital it takes to produce it, who its largest customers are, and how much of the business comes from customers outside Saudi Arabia’s government and PIF ecosystem.

That is the investor story HUMAIN now has several years to build.