US companies are helping Saudi Arabia to build an AI powerhouse

AMD announced a five-year, $10 billion collaboration with Humain to deploy up to 500 megawatts of AI compute in Saudi Arabia and the US, aiming to deploy “multi-exaflop capacity by early 2026.”

AWS, too, is expanding its data centers in Saudi Arabia to bolster Humain’s cloud infrastructure.

Saudi Arabia has abundant oil and gas to power those data centers, and is growing its renewable energy resources with the goal of supplying 50% of the country’s power by 2030.

“Commercial electricity rates, nearly 50% lower than in the US, offer potential cost savings for AI model training, though high local hosting costs due to land, talent, and infrastructure limit total savings,” said Eric Samuel, Associate Director at IDC.

Located near Middle Eastern population centers and fiber optic cables to Asia, these data centers will offer enterprises low-latency cloud computing for real-time AI applications.

Late is great

There’s an advantage to being a relative latecomer to the technology industry, said Eric Samuel, associate director, research at IDC. “Saudi Arabia’s greenfield tech landscape offers a unique opportunity for rapid, ground-up AI integration, unburdened by legacy systems,” he said.