Saudi AI company HUMAIN and NVIDIA announced on 19 November a plan to deploy up to 600,000 NVIDIA GPUs over the next three years, with Elon Musk’s xAI and Amazon Web Services signed up as anchor partners. On the same day, the US Commerce Department authorised exports of advanced NVIDIA chips to HUMAIN and to the UAE’s G42, the permission any plan of this size needs before hardware can actually ship.
What HUMAIN and NVIDIA announced
The HUMAIN release has one headline number and two named customers behind it.
The headline is the GPU count: up to 600,000 NVIDIA GPUs over three years. That is a ceiling, not a purchase order.
The first customer is xAI. HUMAIN says it will build a flagship data centre for xAI with more than 500 megawatts of capacity, and that the first cluster will run on about 18,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs. CNBC reported that xAI will be the first customer of the facility.
The second is AWS. Amazon’s cloud business plans to deploy up to 150,000 NVIDIA GPUs in what the release calls an “AI Zone” in Riyadh.
HUMAIN chief executive Tareq Amin described the NVIDIA partnership as “central to HUMAIN’s mission”. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang went broader:
“AI is essential infrastructure, like electricity, every industry will use it, and every country will build it.” (Jensen Huang, NVIDIA)
That line is the pitch in one sentence. If AI is treated like power generation, then a country that wants a seat at the table needs its own plants, and the Gulf has land, energy and capital to build them.
The export approval is the part that unlocks everything
GPU announcements in the Gulf always carry a quiet asterisk: the chips are American, and Washington decides who gets them. The Commerce Department’s statement addressed that directly.
It authorised the export of up to 35,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GB300 chips, combined, to G42 in the UAE and HUMAIN in Saudi Arabia. The approval comes with what Commerce called “rigorous security and reporting requirements”, monitored by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). The department framed the decision as consistent with “President Trump’s July 2025 AI Action Plan”.
What caught my attention is the gap between the two numbers. The export approval covers up to 35,000 GB300 chips shared between two companies in two countries. The HUMAIN plan talks about up to 600,000 GPUs over three years. For scale, the first xAI cluster alone is planned at about 18,000 GB300s. So this approval reads to me as a first tranche and a test of the monitoring regime, not a blank cheque.
By the numbers
| Item | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA GPUs planned over the next three years | Up to 600,000 | HUMAIN release |
| xAI flagship data centre capacity | More than 500 MW | HUMAIN release |
| GB300 GPUs in xAI’s first cluster | About 18,000 | HUMAIN release; CNBC |
| NVIDIA GPUs AWS plans for the Riyadh AI Zone | Up to 150,000 | HUMAIN release |
| Blackwell GB300 chips cleared for export to G42 and HUMAIN combined | Up to 35,000 | US Commerce Department |
| Agency monitoring the export conditions | BIS | US Commerce Department |
Why it matters, especially in the Gulf
For years the Gulf’s role in AI was mostly as an investor in companies elsewhere. This announcement is about physical capacity inside the region: racks, power and cooling in Saudi Arabia, run for some of the biggest names in the field.
For developers and companies in the Arab world, the AWS piece may matter more day to day than the xAI one. A large pool of NVIDIA GPUs inside a Riyadh AI Zone could mean training and inference closer to home, with lower latency for users in the region and a clearer answer for organisations that need their data to stay in the Kingdom. The release does not spell out pricing, availability dates or which services will run there, so I would treat those as open questions for now.
The pairing with G42 in the same Commerce statement is also telling. Washington is handling Saudi Arabia and the UAE together, with the same conditions and the same monitoring. Both countries now have a path to Blackwell hardware, and both carry reporting obligations that come with it.
What to watch
- Whether Commerce issues further approvals beyond the first 35,000 GB300 chips, and on what terms.
- Details of the “rigorous security and reporting requirements” and how BIS monitoring works in practice.
- Site, power and construction milestones for the xAI data centre of more than 500 MW.
- What AWS actually offers inside the Riyadh AI Zone, and whether customers across the region can use it.
Sources
- US Department of Commerce, Statement on UAE and Saudi chip exports, 19 November 2025, https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/11/statement-uae-and-saudi-chip-exports
- HUMAIN via PR Newswire, HUMAIN expands strategic partnership with NVIDIA, advancing global AI infrastructure with xAI, Global AI and AWS at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, 19 November 2025, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/humain-expands-strategic-partnership-with-nvidia-advancing-global-ai-infrastructure-with-xai-global-ai-and-aws-at-the-us-saudi-investment-forum-302620854.html
- CNBC, Musk’s xAI will be customer for Nvidia data center in Saudi Arabia, 19 November 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/19/musks-xai-will-be-customer-for-nvidia-data-center-in-saudi-arabia.html