Elon Musk's xAI Partners with Saudi Arabia for Massive 500-Megawatt Data Center Project

Elon Musk's xAI will be first customer for Nvidia-backed data center in Saudi Arabia

Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) talks with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 19, 2025 in Washington, DC. Nvidia and xAI said on Wednesday that a large data center facility being built in Saudi Arabia and equipped with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips will count Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup as its first customer. Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were both in attendance at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C. The announcement builds on a partnership from May, when Nvidia said it would provide Saudi Arabia's Humain with chips that use 500 megawatts of power. On Wednesday, Humain said the project would include about 600,000 Nvidia graphics processing units. Humain was launched earlier this year and is owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. The plan to build the data center was initially announced when Huang visited Saudi Arabia alongside President Donald Trump. "Could you imagine, a startup company approximately 0 billion dollars in revenues, now going to build a data center for Elon," Huang said. The facility is one of the most prominent examples of what Nvidia calls "sovereign AI." The chipmaker has said that nations will increasingly need to build data centers for AI in order to protect national security and their culture. It's also a potentially massive market for Nvidia's pricey AI chips beyond a handful of hyperscalers. Huang's appearance at an event supported by President Trump is another sign of the administration's focus on AI. Huang has become friendly with the president as Nvidia lobbies to gain licenses to ship future AI chips to China. When announcing the agreement, Musk, who was a major figure in the early days of the second Trump administration, briefly mixed up the size of the data center, which is measured in megawatts, a unit of power. He joked that plans for a data center that would be 1,000 times larger would have to wait. "That will be eight bazillion, trillion dollars," Musk joked. Humain won't just use Nvidia chips. Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm will also sell chips and AI systems to Humain. AMD CEO Lisa Su and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon both attended a state dinner on Tuesday to honor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. AMD will provide chips that may require as much as 1 gigawatt of power by 2030. The company said the chips that it would provide are its Instinct MI450 GPUs for AI. Cisco will provide additional infrastructure for the data center, AMD said. Qualcomm will sell Humain its new data center chips that were first revealed in October, called the AI200 and AI250. Humain will deploy 200 megawatts of Qualcomm chips, the company said.

Elon Musk's xAI Is Getting a Fancy 500-Megawatt Data Center in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia appears to be fully engaged in a MAGA-washing campaign, buddying up to the Trump administration and its hangers-on to improve its image for billionaires to do business there. It appears to be working. At a US-Saudi investment forum hosted on Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, will build a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia. The build-outâ€"which will be the largest data center outside of the US, according to The New York Timesâ€"will be part of a partnership with Saudi Arabia's state-owned AI startup Humain and will tap Nvidia to provide the chips that will power the project. It is also part of a larger package of deals between US firms and Saudi Arabia, which includes Trump's decision to sell F-35s to the country despite concerns from the Pentagon. The partnership between Musk and Saudi Arabia makes sense on several levels. Despite their fallout that saw Musk claim Trump is in the Epstein files, he remains the most high-profile MAGA-aligned exec out there. The two aren't unfamiliar with each other, as Saudi Arabia's investment arm, Kingdom Holding Company, was one of the biggest financers of Musk's takeover of Twitter. They're also natural partners based on their desires. Musk wants to rapidly expand xAI's infrastructure, regulations be damned, and needs a place that will let him quickly scale so he can power Grok, the chatbot best known for turning into MechaHitler. He's already built a controversial 300-megawatt data center in Memphis, but this project would be the largest cluster to date for xAI. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia badly wants to bring in tech money to diversify its sources of wealth beyond oil, and it has lots of land, power, and fiber optic wires that it is ready to deploy. Humain, the state's AI project, aims to power six percent of all AI processing in the coming years. This data center would be a significant move toward that goal. The data center does still face some obstacles, including the fact that Saudi Arabia can't currently purchase the latest and greatest chips from Nvidia due to export controls put in place by the Trump administration. But don't worry, Trump seems more than happy to lift those restrictions so that Humain can meet its goal of deploying 400,000 AI chips by 2030. Tareq Amin, the head of Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence startup Humain, has been courting favor with the Trump administration for exactly this reason, including promising not to do business with Chinese firms like Huawei. In case there was any doubt, it appears you can still grease the wheels of dealmaking with the Trump administration with flattery and favoritism.

Why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang namechecked this Saudi AI startup three times in his earnings call | Fortune

On Nvidia's latest earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang name-checked some of the customers driving the AI chip company's surging revenues. That included the big three cloud providers -- Amazon, Microsoft, and Google -- as well as the best-known AI startups, OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI. But it also included a lesser-known Saudi Arabian startup, Humain, that got not one but three shout outs in Huang's comments. Humain is barely six months old, but it is rapidly becoming a major force in the global build out of AI infrastructure. Founded by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and backed by the nation's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, Humain has ambitions to supply 6% of the world's AI computing power by 2034, which would make it the world's third largest AI data center provider behind the U.S. and China. Huang's mentions of Humain on Nvidia's earnings call come a day after the CEO attended a state dinner at the White House for the Crown Prince, who is visiting the U.S. for the first time since 2018. Coinciding with the visit, Humain announced a deal with Nvidia and Amazon to put 150,000 of Nvidia's chips, including some of its state-of-the-art Grace Blackwell 300s, in data centers in a new "AI Zone" being built in the Saudi capital Riyadh. The company also signed a landmark deal with xAI to build a 500 megawatt data center for the company in Saudi Arabia. Nvidia will supply the chips for that data center too. "Because of our deep partnership with Elon and xAI, we were able to bring that opportunity to Saudi Arabia, to the KSA, so that Humain could also be hosting opportunity for xAI," Huang said on the earnings call. Under the leadership of former Aramco executive Tareq Amin, Humain is aiming to be a "full stack" AI company, controlling not just the data centers on which AI models are run, but also building models itself. It has trained and launched a large language model, called ALAM, that was designed to perform better than competitors at Arabic language tasks, as well as avoiding culturally and politically sensitive topics. It has also launched an AI-native laptop and an AI operating system called Humain One. But Humain's biggest impact may be as an AI infrastructure builder, creating data centers that it leases to other cloud hyperscalers or AI companies. Saudi Arabia believes its energy resources -- including abundant solar power as well as oil and gas -- as well as the ease of permitting and construction in the kingdom, mean that it will be able to serve AI software for 30% less than what similar processing would cost in the U.S. The country also has robust fiber optic connections to other countries. That could make Humain the preferred AI provider for much of the Middle East and Asia, as well as possibly drawing workloads from even further afield. Saudi Arabia is not alone in trying to establish itself as a "third pole" of AI development outside of the U.S. and China. Its regional rival the United Arab Emirates has similar ambitions. Through its own sovereign wealth funds, the UAE has backed G42, a company that is also pursuing a "full stack" approach to AI development. G42 has been around since 2018 and had a head start on Humain in creating large data centers for generative AI models. But U.S. national security officials under the Biden Administration had raised concerns about G42's connections to Chinese companies, and had held up exports of Nvidia's advanced AI chips to the company. These officials worried that the AI technology might leak to Chinese firms. A $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft in April 2024, brokered in part by U.S. government, was supposed to clear the way for G42 to receive Nvidia chips, but both companies complained that the U.S. Commerce Department was slow to approve exports of Nvidia chips to G42 even after the deal. Some national security experts have raised similar concerns about Humain, since Saudi Arabia, while a U.S. ally, also has defense technology transfer agreements with China. And some Saudi companies, including oil giant Aramco, have been vocal about their use of AI models developed by Chinese companies, such as DeepSeek. But the Commerce Department just this week approved the export of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Meanwhile, Humain has been signing deals with other AI chip providers besides Nvidia. It struck a $10 billion deal with Nvidia's chief rival AMD to deploy 500 megawatts of AI compute based on AMD's chips within the next five years. It signed a partnership with Qualcomm to use its AI200 and AI250 AI chips for 200 megawatts of computing capacity, starting in 2026. It has also partnered with AI chip startup Groq.

Elon Musk announces massive xAI data center in Saudi Arabia

Elon Musk, CEO of xAI and Tesla, announced a massive new data center project in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday as part of Mohammad bin Salman's visit to the United States. In partnership with Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN AI company, which was established under the kingdom's sovereign wealth fund, Musk said the 500 megawatt data center for xAI would be powered by Nvidia's computing chips. In comparison, xAI's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis -- one of the world's largest working computing clusters -- represents around 300MW of computing power. Separately, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a 100 megawatt data center for Amazon Web Services "with a gigawatt ambition and counting," also to be powered by Nvidia chips. Wednesday's announcements come on the heels of Tuesday's unveiling of a new AI Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, giving "the Kingdom access to world-leading American systems while protecting U.S. technology from foreign influence," according to the White House. Sharing the stage with Huang and Saudi Arabia's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha on Wednesday, Musk laid out a vision of the future replete with robots and AI data centers in outer space. "Humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever," Musk said, declaring that the ubiquitous robots will render work optional to a round of applause at the Kennedy Center. Predicting the future of the AI computing industry, Musk said: "perhaps in the four or five-year time frame, the lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar-powered AI satellites." Musk initially tripped over the size of xAI's data center announcement, appearing to announce a 500 gigawatt data center -- around ten times larger than the world's current data center energy consumption -- before clarifying such a construction would cost "eight bazillion trillion dollars."

Nvidia to supply GPUs for xAI Saudi project as Brookfield assembles $100B AI infrastructure platform - SiliconANGLE

Nvidia to supply GPUs for xAI Saudi project as Brookfield assembles $100B AI infrastructure platform The race to build new infrastructure to support the ongoing boom in artificial intelligence continued apace today with two new announcements: xAI Inc. and Nvidia Corp. are partnering on a large data center project in Saudi Arabia and Brookfield Asset Management is launching a program that could scale to $100 billion for global AI infrastructure buildouts. The announcements highlight expanding investment from both sovereign entities and institutional capital as demand for high-performance compute continues to accelerate. According to the Wall Street Journal, xAI will work with Saudi-backed Humain to develop a 500-megawatt facility equipped with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. The project is part of Saudi Arabia's wider push to secure domestic AI capabilities and reduce reliance on foreign cloud providers. For xAI, priority access to a compute site of this scale will offer a strategic boost in GPU availability. The data center is expected to include around 600,000 Nvidia GPUs. For Nvidia, its involvement reinforces its position as the dominant supplier of AI hardware as global demand strains supply chains. The partnership also expands the company's footprint in sovereign AI initiatives, an area where many governments are now seeking long-term, guaranteed access to compute. The deal also gives Saudi Arabia a significant asset as it pursues a national AI strategy. Also announced today were plans by Brookfield Asset Management to build and finance up to $100 billion in AI infrastructure assets spanning land, power, data centers and compute. The effort includes a new fund targeting $10 billion in equity commitments, supported by Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority. Brookfield is notably treating AI compute capacity as core infrastructure similar to utilities and communications networks, which in 2025 is arguably a fair call. The program is designed to accelerate global deployment of AI-ready facilities by combining institutional capital with technology-vendor partnerships. Nvidia will be both a hardware provider and a strategic collaborator in large-scale infrastructure financing and the involvement of Kuwait's sovereign wealth fund is, like the xAI Saudi deal, another case of national investors playing a significant role in long-term economic planning. The xAI-Saudi data center project and Brookfield's global program are both indicative of AI leadership that is increasingly being tied to physical infrastructure rather than software alone. With all companies struggling to obtain compute capacity, the next phase of the AI market may well favor those with direct control over large, efficient compute assets instead of those relying solely on cloud-based capacity.

Saudi Arabia backs Elon Musk's xAI with data center deal

Musk's xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, agreed to work with the state-backed Saudi company Humain to build a new data center in the Gulf country. The project is set to consume as much as 500 megawatts of electricity, which would make it xAI's biggest data center outside the United States. Elon Musk has been hunting for partners to grow his artificial intelligence startup xAI as it tries to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has been trying to diversify his oil-rich country's economy by making it a global hub for tech and artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, their intersecting interests led to a deal. Musk's xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, agreed to work with the state-backed Saudi company Humain to build a new data center in the Gulf country. The project is set to consume as much as 500 megawatts of electricity, which would make it xAI's biggest data center outside the United States. Humain and xAI did not disclose the value of the deal. The project was part of a package of military and tech deals announced Wednesday during Crown Prince Mohammed's visit to Washington. The United States and Saudi Arabia appear to have reached an agreement that clears the path for the kingdom to buy the US semiconductors needed to power artificial intelligence, as the United States has used AI chips as part of geopolitical diplomacy. Working with xAI is a victory for Humain, an AI company created by Crown Prince Mohammed in May with backing from the country's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund. Through Humain, Saudi Arabia is aiming to position itself as an AI exporter. The goal is to use the country's ample energy reserves, deep pockets, abundance of land and links to global fiber optic networks to provide cheap AI computing power, including to companies based elsewhere. Humain has set a target of powering 6% of the global AI workload in the coming years. The deal with xAI, which includes expanding the use of Grok's AI models in Saudi Arabia, deepens Musk's business ties to the country. The kingdom also backed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in 2022, before he renamed it X. Musk has poured money into xAI since founding the company in March 2023, including building a data center called Colossus in the Memphis, Tennessee, area. "The future of intelligence will be engineered through massive and efficient compute combined with the most-advanced AI models," Musk said in a statement. "Humain's capabilities enable us to build that future faster in Saudi Arabia." Tareq Amin, the CEO of Humain, said the deal was "creating scale that few others can match." The xAI deal has been in the works for months but was held up partly by uncertainty over Saudi Arabia's access to the key semiconductors. In May, President Donald Trump announced a deal to send thousands of AI chips made by Nvidia to the kingdom. But the chips had not been delivered over US concerns about Saudi Arabia's economic and tech ties to China. As major American AI firms have pledged to spend billions to win the tech race, the Gulf has been one of the few places with enough available money to provide support. Now each major American AI company appears to be emerging with its own Middle Eastern champion. OpenAI signed a deal this year with the United Arab Emirates' state-backed investment firm, MGX, to build a data center near Abu Dhabi with another Emirati company, G42. Anthropic has garnered investment from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qualcomm and other tech firms have also been expanding business in Saudi Arabia. Human rights issues, once a deterrent for many companies to working with Saudi Arabia, no longer appear to be a major concern. On Tuesday, executives from many of the biggest tech companies attended a dinner hosted by Trump honoring Crown Prince Mohammed, including Musk.

xAI To Be First Customer Of Saudi Data Center With 600,000 Nvidia Chips -- Jensen Huang Praises Startup With '0 Billion' Revenue Building For Elon Musk - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, will be the inaugural client of a massive Saudi-backed data center powered by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Corp.'s (NASDAQ:NVDA) chips. Saudi Arabia's Mega AI Project Takes Shape On Wednesday, at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Musk highlighted the ambitious plans for a new data center operated by Humain, a Saudi Public Investment Fund-backed company. The facility is set to deploy roughly 600,000 Nvidia graphics processing units, making it one of the largest AI-focused data centers in the world. "Could you imagine, a startup company approximately 0 billion dollars in revenues, now going to build a data center for Elon," Huang said during the event. See Also: Jensen Huang Says Being A CEO Is About 'Sacrifice': Nvidia Chief Credits His Mother For Preparing Him For The Road Ahead: She Told Me I Was 'Special' xAI To Lead As First Customer During the forum, Musk confirmed that xAI will be the first customer to leverage the Saudi data center, which will be powered by 500 megawatts of Nvidia chips. Musk also joked about future expansions, saying a facility 1,000 times larger "would be eight bazillion, trillion dollars," highlighting his signature humor about tech scale. Global Chipmakers Join The Initiative Humain won't rely solely on Nvidia. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) will supply its Instinct MI450 GPUs, potentially consuming up to 1 gigawatt of power by 2030. Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM) will provide its AI200 and AI250 data center chips, accounting for 200 megawatts of power, while Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) will support additional infrastructure. Nvidia ranks in the 98th percentile for Growth and the 92nd percentile for Quality in Benzinga's Edge Stock Rankings, underscoring its exceptional performance relative to industry peers. Read Next: David Tepper's Hedge Funds Bets On AMD, Nvidia In Q3, Takes Profits On Intel Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo courtesy: jamesonwu1972 / Shutterstock.com NVDANVIDIA Corp$196.305.24%OverviewAMDAdvanced Micro Devices Inc$235.315.26%CSCOCisco Systems Inc$78.880.63%QCOMQualcomm Inc$167.500.84%TSLATesla Inc$411.591.88%Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Elon Musk, Nvidia unveil deal with Saudi state-backed firm to build...

Elon Musk's xAI and Jensen Huang-led Nvidia announced Wednesday they are partnering with Saudi Arabia's state-backed artificial intelligence firm to build a massive AI data center in the Persian Gulf kingdom. The center is expected to consume as much as 500 megawatts of electricity - making it xAI's largest site outside the US, according to reports. As part of the deal, Musk's xAI chatbot, Grok, will be deployed throughout Saudi Arabia, according to an xAI press release. The partners did not share the value of the deal. The US on Wednesday appeared to clear the way for Saudi Arabia to buy American semiconductors during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's trip to Washington, DC. US authorities have been blocking the sale of AI semiconductors to the Middle East, putting a damper on the crown prince's plans to turn his oil-rich kingdom into a hub for new tech. Musk, meanwhile, has been racing to build out pricey data centers - particularly his Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, Tenn. - in hopes of catching up with industry giants like OpenAI. The new deal was reportedly in the works for months. It was held up by the AI chip export curbs, according to the New York Times. It's not the first time Musk has turned to the kingdom for partners. Saudi Arabia backed the billionaire's $44 billion purchase of Twitter - since renamed X - in 2022. "The future of intelligence will be engineered through massive, efficient compute combined with the most advanced AI models," Musk said in a statement Wednesday. "Humain's capabilities enable us to build that future faster in Saudi Arabia," he added, referring to the Saudi state-backed AI firm. Humain CEO Tareq Amin said the deal will "[create] scale that few others can match." Humain, which was created in May with funding from the kingdom's $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, also announced a partnership with Cisco and AMD on Wednesday. Humain committed to developing up to one gigawatt - or roughly the capacity of a large power plant - of AI infrastructure by 2030. Prince Mohammed has been trying to transform Saudi Arabia into a major AI exporter, looking to take advantage of the kingdom's vast energy reserves and abundant land. AI data centers -- widely viewed as the key to winning the artificial intelligence race -- are mostly located in the US, Europe and China. Humain is aiming to power 6% of the global AI workload over the coming years. American tech firms have been leaning heavily on Middle Eastern partners to fund expensive AI infrastructure projects - including Saudi Arabia, despite its history of human rights abuses. OpenAI signed a deal this year with MGX, a United Arab Emirates state-backed firm, and Anthropic has received funding from Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. Several tech leaders, including Musk, joined the crown prince at a White House dinner hosted by Trump on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN and xAI partner on AI data centers By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN and Elon Musk's xAI announced a framework agreement to build large-scale GPU data centers in Saudi Arabia and deploy xAI's Grok AI models nationwide. The partnership, revealed Wednesday at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., will establish a network of data centers anchored by a flagship 500+ megawatt facility. This marks xAI's first major compute deployment outside the United States. The collaboration combines HUMAIN's infrastructure capabilities with xAI's expertise in frontier AI systems. The companies will integrate Grok models into HUMAIN's agent platform, HUMAIN ONE, to provide AI-powered decision-making tools across government and private sectors. "The future of intelligence will be engineered through massive and efficient compute combined with the most advanced AI models. HUMAIN's capabilities enable us to build that future faster in Saudi Arabia," said Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of xAI. "This collaboration represents the first of its kind partnership to deploy xAI's Grok across an entire country." Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, added, "Together with xAI, we are creating scale that few others can match and speed that redefines what is possible, and compute that will shape the world's most advanced technologies." HUMAIN, a company owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), aims to build a fully integrated AI value chain from infrastructure to applied solutions. The partnership advances the company's strategy to deliver high-performance AI infrastructure at competitive costs. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.