US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw will take a few hundred thousand GPUs with his missiles and fighter jets

The Saudi government on Tuesday announced a massive $600 billion investment in US defense, transportation, energy, and IT infrastructure.

It's not just American military contractors reveling at the thought of packing Saudi armories and airfields with $142 billion worth of fighter jets and missiles. Prince Mohammed bin Salman's shopping spree also includes filling its bit barns with America's finest GPUs and AI accelerators.

By 2030, the nation hopes – key word, hopes – to deploy several hundred thousand of these chips, as it looks to move away from being an extractive petrostate and establish itself as a center for AI research and development.

These deployments will be overseen by a just-announced Saudi state-backed startup called Humain – oh the irony – with plans to offer a variety of AI services, products and tools, and advance the development of "one of the world's most powerful multimodal Arabic large language models (LLMs)."

While the US and Saudi Arabia long being allies, it still represents a shift in US trade policy with regard to AI accelerators. Going back to mid-2023, access to these chips have been restricted across much of the Middle East, for fear that the chips may have passed through on their way to Russia, China, or other US adversaries. AI diffusion rules put forward in the final days of the Biden administration would have further cemented those rules, but were officially rescinded earlier on Tuesday.

Among the first of these deployments will be a cluster of 18,000 of Nvidia's GB300 superchips, each of which is equipped with four Blackwell Ultra GPUs for a total of 72,000 accelerators. That works out to 1,000 NVL72 racks totaling roughly 120MW of compute.

And that's just the beginning, or so we're told. In a statement Tuesday, Nvidia said Humain would deploy roughly 500 megawatts of "AI factories" powered by "several hundred thousand of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs over the next five years."

The Saudis aren't betting it all on Nvidia. In a separate statement, AMD said it's also very happy to help Humain spend up to $10 billion on rolling out 500MW of AMD-based AI compute over that same period. While AMD didn't say just how many chips it would sell to the Saudi upstart, it did say these deployments would span its portfolio of CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, and mobile processors.

All of these accelerators will need datacenters to go into, and at least some of them are likely to find a home in Amazon Web Services' Saudi cloud region, set to open in 2026. In a statement, the cloud giant said the $5.3 billion datacenter campus — or as they've taken to calling it an "AI Zone" — will be packed brimful with compute, AI infrastructure, networking, and services.

Speaking of networking, Humain has tapped Cisco to build out its network infrastructure and provide training to local IT professionals at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Qualcomm, meanwhile, has signed up to provide Humain with AI datacenters, a new server-class CPU platform, and a host of SoCs for AI edge compute.

And while AI chip startup Groq didn't make any announcements specific to Humain today, the company will reportedly power at least some of the AI provider's inference services. This wouldn't be too surprising, as Groq already has close ties to Saudi oil magnate Aramco.

The kingdom's AI ambitions aren't limited to domestic IT infrastructure either. Saudi-based DataVolt will allegedly invest $20 billion in AI datacenters and energy infrastructure in the US, according a White House fact sheet.

The datacenter operator is also working with Google, Oracle, Salesforce, AMD, and Uber to invest a collective $80 billion in "cutting-edge transformative technologies in both countries."

The Saudis may soon face some competition in the region.

Later this week, Trump is slated to visit the United Arab Emirates, where he's widely expected to loosen chip curbs. ®

Now read: Saudi Arabia has the wealth – and desire – to become an AI player