US and Saudi Arabia Sign Strategic AI Technology Partnership

The United States and Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Artificial Intelligence Partnership on November 19, 2025, to coordinate the supply of advanced semiconductors and the development of AI infrastructure. The agreement, endorsed by President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, streamlines US export approvals for tens of thousands of AI chips to the Kingdom, provided security conditions prevent the hardware from benefiting China. In exchange, Saudi Arabia has pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in US investment.

Central to this strategy is HUMAIN, a Saudi state-backed AI firm funded by the Public Investment Fund. Led by CEO Tareq Amin, HUMAIN is pursuing a full-stack approach to make Saudi Arabia a global AI hub. The company announced several massive infrastructure projects, including the AI Zone in Riyadh with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nvidia, which will deploy 150,000 accelerators. HUMAIN also formed a joint venture with AMD and Cisco to build up to 1 GW of capacity by 2030 and partnered with Elon Musk's xAI to build a 500-megawatt data center for the Grok chatbot.

Further expanding its ecosystem, HUMAIN led a $900 million Series C funding round for Luma AI to develop Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt supercluster. To localize AI, HUMAIN partnered with Adobe and Qualcomm to integrate its ALLAM large language model into creative software, tailoring generative AI to Middle Eastern culture and values. These initiatives aim for Saudi Arabia to command 6% of global AI processing power by 2034.