Saudi Arabia's AI company Humain is engaged in detailed negotiations with leading private equity and investment firms, including Blackstone Inc. and BlackRock Inc., over a major funding alliance aimed at strengthening its data centre infrastructure and other AI-related operation capacities. Key participants say the deal size could run into the billions of dollars.

Humain, which is wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund and chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, began construction of its first two data centres in Riyadh and Dammam that are expected to come online in early 2026. Each facility will initially support up to 100 megawatts of capacity and utilise advanced semiconductors from U. S. firms including Nvidia's“Blackwell” chips.

The company already has major contracts with technology firms such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. The AMD deal, for example, involves a commitment of around $10 billion to establish and scale AI compute infrastructure. Humain's strategy also includes launching a venture capital fund of about $10 billion to invest in AI start-ups across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Experts and officials view the private equity talks as part of a broader lens through which Saudi Arabia is reorienting its economy. The AI sector, through Humain, is being leveraged to diversify beyond oil, build local innovation capacity, and establish strategic infrastructure. Incentives for foreign partners include favourable regulatory conditions and low energy costs.

Tareq Amin, Humain's Chief Executive Officer, has emphasised that the outcome of the talks will depend not only on the amount invested but also on partners' technical capabilities in areas such as cloud services, AI model deployment, and secure infrastructure. He has also underscored that Humain aims to develop one of the largest multimodal Arabic language models.

Construction of the new data centres will rely on U. S. chips, already cleared by local regulators, with the first batch of semiconductors from Nvidia scheduled for delivery. The strategic loading of cutting-edge hardware reflects Humain's urgency in building world-scale compute capacity.

While no final decisions have been made on the structure or exact scale of the deal with Blackstone, BlackRock, or other firms, insiders describe the negotiations as substantive. The partnership could include equity stakes, revenue-sharing models, or co-investment in infrastructure projects.

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