Mohammed bin Salman

Mohammed bin Salman (born 1985), crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia and de facto ruler since 2017, has made artificial intelligence a centerpiece of Vision 2030, his program to wean the kingdom off oil. Backed by the roughly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund, his AI ambitions are measured not in startups but in gigawatts.

Humain and the chip deals

In May 2025 he founded and became chairman of Humain, a PIF-owned company spanning the full AI stack — data centers, cloud, and Arabic large language models — with a stated ambition to supply 6% of the world’s AI compute by 2034, which would make the kingdom the third-largest AI data-center power after the US and China. Humain’s launch coincided with a US–Saudi investment forum attended by President Trump, where Jensen Huang’s Nvidia agreed to supply hundreds of thousands of advanced chips for Saudi “AI factories” and AMD signed a $10 billion, 500-megawatt deal, as Washington eased chip-export curbs.

As early as the 2020 Global AI Summit in Riyadh, bin Salman was casting Saudi Arabia as an AI convener. Critics see darker threads: the kingdom’s human-rights record — indelibly marked by the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — sits uneasily beside Silicon Valley’s eager courtship of Saudi capital, and analysts warn that abundant Saudi compute could become an instrument of surveillance and geopolitical leverage between Washington and Beijing. For bin Salman, cheap energy plus sovereign chips is simply the next oil.