Today's Edition
(BLOOMBERG)
Saudi Arabia’s new artificial intelligence company Humain is partnering with private equity giant Blackstone Inc. to build data centres in the kingdom with an initial investment of about $3 billion.
AirTrunk, owned by Blackstone and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will work alongside Humain to develop a long-term partnership focused on financing, developing, and operating data centres and AI infrastructure throughout Saudi Arabia, the firms said in a statement on Tuesday.
The deal, unveiled on the sidelines of Riyadh’s Future Investment Initiative, is a clear example of Saudi Arabia’s pivot towards sectors including AI. Blackstone and BlackRock Inc. have been vying to invest billions of dollars with Humain, Bloomberg News has previously reported.
The move adds to a flurry of recent activity in the industry, where marquee investors and tech companies have committed billions of dollars to help build out infrastructure to support models and services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Blackstone, for its part, has built an empire of data centres around the word. It paid about $16 billion last year for AirTrunk, which operates data centres in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia.
Speaking at a panel at FII on Tuesday, Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman singled out AI and data centres are some of the most interesting areas for investment. He cautioned, however, that electricity to power them could be in "short supply.”
Middle Eastern entities have also emerged as a particularly crucial source of funding for for the capital-intensive sector. Humain was set up by the Public Investment Fund in May, and has been positioned as a national champion for the kingdom’s AI efforts.
It recently broke ground on its first data centres in Saudi Arabia and plans to have them up and running early next year. Humain is also in the process of procuring semiconductors from US chipmakers, including Nvidia Corp., and plans to add 1.9 gigawatts’ worth of data centres by 2030.
The companies didn’t share details on the location of the data centre campus, its overall capacity, or the type of chips they plan to use.
Humain counts companies like Qualcomm Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. as partners, and is in early talks with Elon Musk’s xAI on a data centre deal in Saudi Arabia. Humain Ventures, a $10 billion fund, launched this summer and has started deploying capital.
Speaking at a separate FII panel, Humain’s chief executive Tareq Amin said his goal is for Saudi Arabia to be the third-largest AI infrastructure provider, behind the US and China.
Its latest partnership marks "a pivotal moment in creating scalable, secure, and sustainable data centre capacity to support the rapid growth of AI and cloud computing,” he said in the statement.
