Saudi Arabia announces AI unit as Trump lands in Riyadh

• Tech high on agenda for talks
• PIF-backed company called Humain
• Arabic LLM among tools

Saudi Arabia has announced a state-backed artificial intelligence company as President Donald Trump lands in Riyadh.

Technology is expected to be high on the agenda during Trump’s tour, which also takes in Qatar and the UAE, as Gulf economies seek improved access to US chips to meet their AI ambitions.

The Saudi AI company, called Humain, is backed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF). It will develop advanced AI infrastructure, including next-generation data centres, cloud platforms and large-scale Arabic language models, according to the state owned Saudi Press Agency. 

The company will also roll out one of the most powerful multimodal Arabic large language models to date – part of a broader push to close the regional gap in AI capabilities.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who met Trump at King Khalid airport on Tuesday, will chair Humain himself.

Reuters/Brian Snyder

“It’s really important that the United States and the GCC countries form close partnerships on the technologies that are meaningful to national security when our interests align,” Thea Kendler, a partner in Washington at law firm Mayer Brown and a  former US assistant secretary for export administration, previously told AGBI.

Saudi Arabia has set a target for AI to account for 12 percent of its GDP by 2030.

The governor of PIF, Yasir Al Rumayyan, said last October that “AI alone could add $20 trillion to the global economy by 2030. By 2027 AI’s role as an economic driver will become a benchmark of national power.”

Under the Biden administration, Washington imposed strict controls on the export of advanced AI chips to the Middle East over fears the technology could be diverted to China or used for military applications. 

Trump has signalled a willingness to reassess these curbs.

“We might be doing that [easing].” Trump said earlier this month. “It will be announced soon.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pledged a combined $2 trillion in trade and investment in the US, some of it targeting sensitive technology sectors including semiconductors, cloud computing and AI research.

“One way they could be pitching it is that, in exchange for massive investments in the US, they would like the Trump administration to greenlight the export of more chips to the Gulf,” said Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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