Elon Musk announced a major partnership between his AI company xAI and Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI firm Humain (backed by the Suadi Public Investment Fund) to build a 500-megawatt (MW) AI data center in the kingdom.
It will use Nvidia GPUs and will be xAI’s largest and first data center project outside the United States.
Full build-out targets 500 MW of power consumption (one of the largest single AI training/inference facilities planned globally).
Phase 1 will start at 50 MW.
xAI (providing Grok models and expertise)
Humain (Saudi infrastructure and funding)
Nvidia (supplying chips, likely GB200/Blackwell or next-gen).
The deal includes broader deployment of Grok AI models across Saudi Arabia and potential sovereign AI capabilities.
Announced onstage by Elon Musk alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the U.S.–Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the U.S.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I never understood why this no sense to build data center in very hot places..
Indeed. Cooling is going to be a problem in a place with little water.
Cheap energy, no regulatory hurdles in building and almost free land outweigh 10-20 degree higher temperature.