The AI announcements from LEAP 2026 worth knowing

HUMAIN’s planned $10B VC fund could get even bigger. Tareq Amin told Semafor the global AI vehicle may launch above its previously announced $10 billion target this year, alongside a separate HUMAIN Limitless vehicle focused on Saudi AI companies. Investments will be tied to portfolio companies using Saudi compute or bringing staff to the Kingdom.

HUMAIN unveiled a new 428B-parameter Arabic model built with China’s MiniMax. HUMAIN-M3 was further trained on more than one trillion Arabic tokens and is now in research preview through HUMAIN Node, adding an interesting Chinese component to a Saudi AI stack otherwise heavily reliant on US compute.

There’s also a separate $2.5B data-centre fund in the works. Bloomberg reported HUMAIN is looking to raise an initial $2.5 billion from domestic and international investors through a BSF Capital-managed vehicle to finance 250MW of capacity being built with Al Moammar Information Systems, potentially scaling to 1GW.

xAI is taking its first data centre outside the US to Saudi Arabia. Elon Musk’s AI company plans to start with 50MW of capacity in the Kingdom and scale to as much as 500MW, extending a relationship that already includes HUMAIN’s $3 billion investment in xAI.

Together AI and HUMAIN are planning another 250MW Saudi AI data centre. Together will bring its cloud and open-model platform to HUMAIN infrastructure, with the companies targeting more than $5 billion in gross annualised revenue during the project’s first operating year.

AMD’s largest inference cluster outside the US is now live in Saudi Arabia. HUMAIN, AMD and Cisco switched on infrastructure using AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, with HUMAIN planning to deploy 13,000 AMD GPUs this year and add up to another 250MW from 2027.

HUMAIN also switched on its NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra AI cloud. The locally hosted service is already running government and enterprise workloads, with the Saudi Ministry of Commerce among its first disclosed users and HUMAIN claiming utilisation above 90%.

AWS will finally launch its Saudi cloud region in December. The $5.3 billion buildout is being accompanied by an expanded HUMAIN partnership for up to 50MW inside a Saudi AI Zone by 2028, with ALLaM coming to Amazon Bedrock and HUMAIN Fabric to AWS Marketplace.

Microsoft’s Saudi cloud region arrives a month earlier, in November. Separately, Microsoft and HUMAIN will bundle HUMAIN ONE with Microsoft 365 Copilot, initially targeting one million enterprise users across MENA, while HUMAIN’s new AI PC will launch on Windows this month.

HUMAIN and DataVolt have started building at NEOM. Construction is underway on the first 100MW of an AI-ready data centre at Oxagon, part of a 360MW first phase and a longer-term 1.5GW campus.

stc is building another large block of HUMAIN capacity. Through center3, the Saudi telecom group is developing AI-ready data centres beginning at 250MW, with the wider partnership targeting up to 1GW.

Adobe made a $4B-plus Saudi commitment. Its expanded partnership with HUMAIN and MCIT includes a Saudi-focused Firefly image-generation model and a year of free Firefly Standard and Express Premium for more than 27 million eligible residents. Adobe has also become the first major global software company to move regional AI workloads onto HUMAIN’s Qualcomm-powered infrastructure.

Reflection AI is also bringing its models onto HUMAIN infrastructure. The US frontier lab plans to deploy its first generally available model on Saudi sovereign compute, with the companies exploring further model customisation and compute offtake.

HUMAIN and Applied Intuition are targeting autonomous trucking. The two companies announced plans to build what they describe as the world’s largest autonomous trucking network in Saudi Arabia.

ByteDance is putting cloud infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. BytePlus and Mobily are investing more than $150 million to establish BytePlus’s first physical cloud region in the Middle East and Africa in Riyadh, while Tencent Cloud separately secured a Saudi licence to serve government and financial clients.