Amazon Web Services (AWS) and HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund company focused on AI, said on Thursday they plan to provide and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators in a new data centre facility in Riyadh as part of an expanded partnership.
The companies announced the plan at the US-Saudi Investment Forum. AWS will become HUMAIN’s preferred AI partner globally and the two groups will work together to offer AI compute and services from Saudi Arabia to customers worldwide.
The facility, referred to as an AI Zone, will support training and inference workloads using NVIDIA’s latest GB300 infrastructure and AWS Trainium chips. The technology will be aimed at compute-intensive AI tasks including model training and running inference.
AWS said the infrastructure will be integrated with its services including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon AgentCore and Amazon SageMaker. Bedrock will give customers access to a range of foundation models without requiring them to manage underlying compute resources.
HUMAIN will join the AWS Solution Provider Program, allowing customers to access AWS services through a unified platform. The announcement follows a joint plan made in May to invest more than US$5 billion in AI infrastructure, AWS services and talent development in Saudi Arabia.
Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, said the AI Zone is the beginning of a multi-gigawatt infrastructure programme. “From inception, this infrastructure has been engineered to serve both national priorities and the world’s accelerating demand for AI compute,” he said.
“This marks a pivotal moment in our commitment to our partnership with HUMAIN,” said Tanuja Randery, Managing Director for Europe, Middle East and Africa at AWS. She said the two companies aim to establish an innovation hub that can support customers in Saudi Arabia and internationally.
The partnership will also support Saudi Arabia’s plans to expand AI adoption across public and private sectors. AWS and HUMAIN will collaborate on developing advanced Arabic large language models including ALLAM, HUMAIN’s Arabic first model, and create a marketplace for AI agents for government services.
The companies plan to train 100,000 Saudi citizens in cloud computing and generative AI through the Amazon Academy, run in collaboration with PIF, and support an initiative to upskill 10,000 women. According to the announcement, these measures aim to prepare the workforce for an AI-driven economy.
AWS said the Riyadh AI Zone will support global enterprises, technology firms and local organisations and will be designed with security and reliability features to meet demand for large-scale AI workloads.
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