Why the world's richest man met Saudi officials - Inside the high-level talks

Saudi Arabia is strengthening its ties with American AI companies — announcing a flurry of new joint ventures worth billions of dollars. The country seeks to make its mark in the AI industry as its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, makes his first visit to the United States in years.

Humain — an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — announced a series of partnerships with prominent American tech companies, including xAI, Cisco, AMD and Qualcomm, during a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington on Wednesday. Saudi Arabia is trying to further firm up ties with the United States and shift its economy away from oil.

For American companies, the Middle Eastern country answers three urgent problems for AI expansion: funding, space and cheap energy. Elon Musk announced at Wednesday’s event that xAI, his AI company, will develop a huge data center in Saudi Arabia alongside Humain.

The planned 500-megawatt data center would be xAI’s first large-scale center outside of the United States, and the partnership will see xAI’s Grok chatbot deployed throughout Saudi Arabia. “The future of intelligence will be engineered through massive and efficient compute combined with the most advanced AI models,” Musk said in a statement on Wednesday.

The center will be powered by chips from Nvidia, whose founder, Jensen Huang, sat alongside Musk and Saudi Arabian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha at Wednesday’s panel. No further details about the partnership were revealed.

“This is how we walk the talk in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with the US,” Alswaha said. “Yesterday, the president and his royal highness announced the AI strategic framework and partnership.

Today we’re going big with Elon and Jensen, so thank you for those opportunities.” Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the United States is set to approve the first sales of advanced AI chips to Humain. At the event, Alswaha announced a 100-megawatt data center for Amazon Web Services “with a gigawatt ambition” that also will be powered by Nvidia’s infrastructure.

AWS said in a statement that it plans “to provide, deploy and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators” in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. As AI companies expand, their huge data centers need space and massive energy sources.

Many data centers are being built in the United States, including xAI’s Colossus in Memphis. However, there’s fear that China will beat out the United States when it comes to energy production to power AI systems.

Saudi Arabia could help with that — it has much easier access to the space and energy needed to power these massive ventures. All you need to know about Ghana's new vehicle number plates |BizTech:

Source: GhanaWeb