by Toby Lewis
Since coming to power in 2017, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, MBS for short, has pursued various strategies to diversify his country’s economy and reduce its traditional reliance on oil. But perhaps the biggest risk the sovereign has taken thus far is his ambitious plan for AI dominance in the coming decade, with Riyadh now pouring billions into data centres under a new state-backed AI champion – Humain. Established in 2025, Humain seeks to work with American AI giants such as Nvidia and AMD, as well as providing data centres for China’s cutting edge Deepseek model.
One of the flagship projects leading the economic pivot is a planned $5 billion data centre near the Red Sea, in the country’s Northwest. The 2025 Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, nicknamed Davos in the Desert, hosted executives from Google, OpenAI, and Intel, among others. This signalled that the Kingdom is taking a proactive approach to the AI industry and the diversification of its economy.
Some 200 potential plots have been earmarked for development throughout the country with access to a combined 15.6 gigawatts of electrical power, including four large sites close to solar facilities. The move embodies Saudi Arabia’s ambitious plan to increase its share of the global AI workload from 1% to 6% in the coming decade. Further, these developments signal that the kingdom is playing both sides in the US-China AI race – much to President Trump’s dismay – as Washington works to outperform Beijing.
If MBS reaches his AI workload target, Saudi Arabia will become the third largest player in our era’s defining geo-economic contest, after the US and China. While this is no mean feat, the Saudis have three main advantages over other countries in the AI race. First, the country possesses vast amounts of unpopulated land on which to build its new data centres, and state support means that permits are given out easily to developers. Second, its massive oil reserves and rapidly expanding solar capacity position Riyadh to meet the energy demands of such large-scale AI generation.
Lastly, the kingdom’s positioning within the wider region allows it to cater to the maximum number of clients – roughly four billion people on three continents – via undersea cable networks. With regional connectivity having played a pivotal role in propelling the gulf states’ air travel industries to stratospheric success in recent decades, this may prove instrumental in Saudi Arabia’s emergence as an AI superpower.
Some experts remain sceptical. John Dinsdale, a senior analyst at Synergy Research Group, said that while ‘you can never say never, I can’t imagine any circumstances that would enable Saudi [Arabia] to achieve six per cent of the world’s AI compute capacity.” As well as computing capacity, the country has a long way to go in terms of AI expertise and chipmaking.
US-based Nvidia and Taiwan’s TSMC lead the way in the chipmaking and semiconductor industries, while Saudi Arabia produces few of these vital components. The country also faces a shortage of human capital. Years of STEM exclusion in favour of religious study at its universities, have led to a lack of home-grown expertise to staff the country’s burgeoning AI industry.
The Trump administration approved the export of more than 18,000 Nvidia-made chips to Saudi Arabia in 2025, in an attempt to keep the Saudis in the US sphere of influence and curb China’s growing presence. However, reports of the kingdom’s state-backed oil conglomerate Aramco using Deepseek to increase efficiency in its data centres has sparked anxiety in America, putting Saudi access to more AI equipment from the US in jeopardy.
Despite these challenges the Saudis continue to push on with AI developments, which is widely seen as a basis for its future economy. With 30% of global electricity production now fulfilled by renewable alternatives – up from 19% in 2000 – as well as fluctuating oil prices, the world’s foremost exporter is in a hurry to diversify its economy, and it’s energy sector. This is largely due to the cost of solar and wind plummeting, while oil costs remain relatively flat. The Saudis are further driven by regional competition, with the UAE announcing a multi-billion dollar project with OpenAI in Abu Dhabi in 2025.
It seems, however, that the country has greater ambitions than being the world’s AI workhorse. Humain’s CEO, Tareq Amin, dreams of building a “world-first AI operating system for the enterprise.” The new system would compete directly with Microsoft Windows, utilising AI agents in the human resources, finance, and legal sectors and using prompts as opposed to applications such as Word and Excel. Humain wants to vertically integrate by being a one-stop shop for artificial intelligence. The firm’s ambitions are clear in its vision of the future of AI as “Out of the box, end to end, with HUMAIN as your single partner.” As an underdog in the AI space, Saudi Arabia promises to shake up the industry, adding new, innovative ideas to this already diverse and fast-paced market.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and may not reflect the opinions of The St Andrews Economist.
Image credit: NEOM