U.S. AI Startup Together AI Moves to Saudi Arabia Amid Data Center Backlash, Secures $5B Deal

U.S. Start-Up Partners With Saudi Arabia for Data Center

Together AI, which serves open-source artificial intelligence models, announced a deal to use compute from Humain in Saudi Arabia, where it can bypass U.S. backlash over data centers. Data centers require enormous amounts of power and A.I. chips. Increasingly another important factor is at play: Is there enough local support for them? In the United States, the answer is increasingly no, as the backlash against data centers is rising. And that's causing some companies to look abroad to power their A.I. ambitions. In the latest example, the U.S.- based start-up Together AI on Monday announced a partnership with the Saudi Arabia artificial intelligence company Humain. The deal will provide Together AI with 250 megawatts of electricity and 120,000 semiconductors from a Saudi-based data center. Together AI, which was valued at $8.3 billion in July and serves open-source artificial intelligence models to customers, will use Humain's chips and offer a share of its revenue in exchange. Together AI said it expected business from the data center to bring in $5 billion annually. "More and more, local communities don't want data centers in their backyards, and there are a lot of cancellations and moratoriums, so U.S. capacity is becoming even more constrained," said Vipul Prakash, a co-founder and the chief executive of Together AI. Saudi Arabia, where the state often has a hand in the dealings of private businesses, is luring chip-hungry American companies to its new data centers. Many of them are being built by Humain, which was started last year by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as part of the country's effort to jump-start its A.I. industry and diversify its economy away from oil. "Everybody is chasing capacity," said Tareq Amin, the chief executive of Humain. "My G.P.U.s sell before they are ordered," he added, referring to the silicon chips used in data centers to power A.I. models. Humain has announced A.I. data center partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Luma AI, and Elon Musk's xAI (now a part of SpaceX), among others. It has also announced partnerships to purchase chips from the American companies Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. Those deals were made possible after the United States cleared the way for Humain to export an initial batch of 35,000 U.S. semiconductors. Humain has broken ground on two construction sites, one in Riyadh and another in Dammam. The company expects to deploy a total of 250 megawatts of power to its data centers by the start of 2027 and has a goal of supplying 6 gigawatts of power by 2034. The total project is estimated to cost $77 billion. If completed, the data centers would provide an enormous increase in compute capacity to the region. At the end of last year, data centers in the Middle East had just 400 megawatts of power capacity, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. The war in Iran has put pressure on the region's data center push. Iran has attacked Amazon Web Services' data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Amin said he was not concerned about the impact. "We have recovered any lost time" from the war, he said. More tech companies are adopting cheaper, open-source models, which have become nearly as powerful as proprietary closed models from major A.I. labs. That has led to a surge in business for Together AI and left the company eager for any additional computing power it can get. The deal with Humain will roughly triple Together AI's current data center capacity and will be among the largest publicly disclosed data centers built specifically to host open-source models, Mr. Prakesh said. Humain expects to deliver the first 7,000 chips to Together AI by November, and reach its full allocation sometime in 2027. In the meantime, Together AI plans to keep looking abroad for its computing capacity. "I suspect that in 2027 there's probably more international capacity that gets built than in the U.S.," Mr. Prakesh said.

Fleeing Data Center Backlash at Home, American AI Startup Sets Up Shop In Saudi Arabia

Americans' hatred towards AI data centers is big business for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. San Francisco-based tech startup Together AI announced on Monday that it's partnering with Humain, the Saudi Arabian AI company founded last year by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The deal will give Together AI access to 250 megawatts of electricity from data centers located inside Saudi Arabia. It's the Kingdom's latest move to cement itself as an epicenter for the AI industry and expand its investments beyond oil, which turned it into a global financial powerhouse. (Those ambitions appear to be unhindered by the U.S. War in Iran, which has resulted in strikes against Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.) "We are strengthening the region's position as a global hub for AI infrastructure, cloud capabilities, and next-generation AI services," Humain CEO Tareq Amin said in a statement. To that same end, the Kingdom has also been strengthening its ties with the U.S. In May 2025, the Trump administration signed a $600 billion agreement with the Saudi government, through which the latter agreed to spend $20 billion on new data centers within the U.S. in exchange for "state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen U.S. defense firms," according to a statement from the White House. For Together AI, the deal with Humain is a convenient way to skirt growing opposition to data centers back at home. Close to half (48%) of Americans "strongly oppose" new data centers being built in their area, according to a Gallup poll conducted in March, compared to just 7% who said they "strongly favor" construction. The power-guzzling facilities supplying the energy for the AI boom have become a political flashpoint in recent months. AI developers have gone on the defensive, promising big job growth for communities who embrace data centers and reductions in water usage. Trump has tried to dismiss the widespread and well-documented backlash as a foreign psy-op hellbent on derailing American supremacy in the AI race and naivete on the part of disgruntled communities, while the EPA is trying to scrap a decades-old public disclosure requirement that would make it easier for developers to start building new data centers without alerting communities at all. "More and more, local communities don't want data centers in their backyards, and there are a lot of cancellations and moratoriums, so U.S. capacity is becoming even more constrained," Vipul Prakash, Together AI's CEO and cofounder, told the New York Times in a report published Monday. Humain has additional partnerships with AWS, xAI (now SpaceXAI), and -- as of last week -- Microsoft. The Saudi Arabian AI company has also signed a deal with American startup Applied Intuition, aimed at "deploying thousands of autonomous trucks across key Saudi logistics corridors by 2030," according to a press release published Monday. As the Brookings Institute pointed out in a report published earlier this month, the construction of new data centers in Saudi Arabia at a time of escalating conflict throughout the surrounding region raises serious risks and could ultimately backfire. "The consequences could extend beyond commercial losses and may result in degrading U.S. technological advantage," the report reads, "accelerating rivals' capabilities -- especially China -- and potentially undermining the integrity of AI systems on which critical functions depend."