Musk’s xAI and HUMAIN partner to build 500MW AI data centre in Saudi Arabia

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup, xAI, will establish its largest data centre outside the United States in Saudi Arabia through a new deal with the state-backed company HUMAIN.

The partnership centres on building a network of world-class AI data centres in the Kingdom. The flagship project is a single facility designed to consume over 500 megawatts (MW) of power. This vast computing complex will become the physical foundation for training xAI’s large models, including its chatbot Grok.

Musk announced the plan at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington, D.C. The agreement marks a major step for xAI and highlights Saudi Arabia’s increasing global role in AI infrastructure.

Building the Compute Power

The 500 MW facility is one of the biggest AI infrastructure projects publicly announced to date. The scale surpasses xAI's current operation in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Colossus 1, which uses 300 MW of power.

The physical buildout relies on hardware from NVIDIA. The new centre will house thousands of advanced NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, the powerful chips necessary for modern, large-scale AI training. HUMAIN, owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), has a separate, wider agreement with NVIDIA to deploy up to 600,000 chips across its various projects in Saudi Arabia and the US over the next three years. The xAI facility will utilise a significant portion of this capacity.

HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin stated that the partnership creates scale few others can match, giving xAI the ability to build the future of intelligence faster in Saudi Arabia. The data centre will serve as a critical outpost for running and deploying Grok models globally.

Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Goal

For Saudi Arabia, the deal accelerates its national goal of becoming a global AI hub, a key objective under the Vision 2030 plan to diversify the economy away from oil.

HUMAIN aims to power 6% of the global AI workload in the coming years. This partnership with a top-tier US AI company helps meet that target. HUMAIN is also developing its own advanced language models, such as ALLAM, which focuses on providing culturally relevant, Arabic-first conversational AI. The massive compute power provided by the new data centre supports both global partnerships like xAI's and local development efforts.

Geopolitics and Chip Access

The partnership carries political weight, following closely after a high-level AI Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

For months, access to advanced US chips, such as the NVIDIA GB300, faced restrictions due to US concerns over technology security and Saudi Arabia’s ties to other countries. The new agreement signals that the US administration has found a way to permit the sale of the necessary semiconductors, connecting chip access to the broader US-Saudi technological relationship. This geopolitical context was key to finalising the massive infrastructure deal.

The agreement allows Elon Musk to expand his business footprint in Saudi Arabia, which previously supported his purchase of Twitter (now X). The deal positions the country as a major supplier of computing power for firms seeking locations with readily available energy and capital to build energy-intensive AI centres.