Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Saudi Arabia’s Humain plan to deploy up to 150,000 artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators in an ‘AI Zone’ data centre in Riyadh.

The partnership involves AWS becoming Humain’s preferred global AI partner, with the two companies aiming to deliver AI services from Saudi Arabia to customers worldwide. The initiative is part of a previously announced plan to invest more than $5bn in AI infrastructure, cloud services and skills development in the kingdom.

The Riyadh AI Zone is described as a first-of-its-kind facility in Saudi Arabia, designed to support advanced AI training and inference using Nvidia GB300 infrastructure alongside AWS’s custom Trainium chips. The site will target compute-intensive workloads, from training large language models to running inference for enterprise AI applications.

AWS says the platform will integrate its generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, AgentCore and SageMaker, allowing customers to access multiple foundation models without managing underlying hardware.

Global hub

Executives from both firms framed the project as a step towards positioning Saudi Arabia as a global AI hub. “We’re establishing a world-class innovation hub that will serve customers across Saudi Arabia and around the globe,” said Tanuja Randery, managing director for Europe, Middle East and Africa at AWS.

Humain CEO Tareq Amin said the collaboration marked “the beginning of a multi-gigawatt journey” in AI compute.

Beyond infrastructure, the partners plan to co-develop Arabic large language models – including Humain’s ‘Allam’ – and create an AI agent marketplace for government services. AWS has also committed to training 100,000 Saudis in cloud and generative AI, including 10,000 women, supporting the kingdom’s target of adding an estimated $130bn to GDP from AI by 2030.