HUMAIN is building Saudi compute in 100MW increments

HUMAIN, the artificial intelligence company owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and launched in May 2025, has broken ground on its first two data centres, in Riyadh and Dammam. Each is expected to come online with an initial capacity of up to 100 megawatts, with the first facilities due in the second quarter of 2026, according to chief executive Tareq Amin. The company's stated roadmap runs a great deal further than that. It targets 1.9 gigawatts of installed data centre capacity by 2030 and six gigawatts by 2034. Two hundred megawatts against a six-gigawatt target is a ratio worth understanding. The first phase represents roughly three per cent of the 2034 goal, and the eight years in between deliver the rest. That is how programmes of this kind are built. Data centre capacity arrives in increments because power, cooling and chip supply arrive in increments, and phasing is the standard approach for every operator at this scale. It does mean the useful way to track HUMAIN's progress is by watching each phase land rather than by reading the 2034 figure as current capacity. Accelerator supply is the gating item. HUMAIN has received local regulatory approval to purchase 18,000 of Nvidia's latest AI chips, contingent on the governance protocols involved and on approval from the United States government. This is a structural feature of every Gulf compute programme. The concrete, the power and the capital are domestic. The accelerators are manufactured elsewhere, under an export regime that treats advanced compute as a strategic control point. Construction schedules and licensing schedules are therefore independent variables, and both have to land for capacity to come online. The company is also reported to be forming a joint venture with AMD, under which AMD would take equity in a Saudi special purpose vehicle. Diversifying the silicon supply is a sensible hedge, though AMD's accelerators sit under the same export regime. HUMAIN's stated ambition is for Saudi Arabia to become the world's third-largest AI provider. The two ahead are not named, and the arithmetic points to the United States and China occupying the first two places, with third meaning a position ahead of the European Union, Japan and the current regional leader. Against that, the UAE's Stargate project at Masdar City is planning a one-gigawatt cluster inside a five-gigawatt campus, with its first 200MW phase expected online in 2026 — the same year as HUMAIN's opening pair, at larger scale. The two countries are running comparable programmes from different starting positions. Saudi Arabia has more land, more domestic power generation and a larger population to justify demand. The UAE started earlier and has longer-standing operating relationships with the American hyperscalers.