Blackstone partners with Saudi Arabia’s Humain to build AI data centers in the Kingdom

Private equity giant Blackstone Inc. is partnering with Saudi Arabia’s new artificial intelligence company, Humain, to build data centers in the kingdom with an initial investment of about $3 billion.

AirTrunk, owned by Blackstone and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will work alongside Humain to develop a long-term partnership focused on financing, developing, and operating data centers and AI infrastructure throughout Saudi Arabia, the firms said in a statement on Tuesday.

Humain Chief Executive Officer Tareq Amin said in an interview on Tuesday that the effort will likely grow and may eventually include other firms such as BlackRock Inc., KKR & Co. and DigitalBridge Group Inc. KKR declined to comment.

The deal, unveiled on the sidelines of Riyadh’s Future Investment Initiative, is a clear example of Saudi Arabia’s pivot towards sectors including AI. Blackstone and BlackRock have both been vying to invest billions of dollars with Humain, Bloomberg News has previously reported.

The move adds to a flurry of recent activity in the industry, where marquee investors and tech companies have committed billions of dollars to help build out infrastructure to support models and services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Blackstone, for its part, has built an empire of data centers around the word. It paid about $16 billion last year for AirTrunk, which operates data centers in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Malaysia.

Speaking at a panel at FII on Tuesday, Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman singled out AI and data centers are some of the most interesting areas for investment. He cautioned, however, that electricity to power them could be in “short supply.”

Middle Eastern entities have also emerged as a particularly crucial source of funding for the capital-intensive sector. Humain, a relatively late entrant to the race, was set up by the Public Investment Fund in May, and has been positioned as a national champion for the kingdom’s AI efforts. On Tuesday, PIF and Aramco announced a non-binding term sheet outlining an agreement for Aramco to buy a “significant minority stake” in Humain.

It recently broke ground on its first data centers in Saudi Arabia and plans to have them up and running early next year.

Humain is also in the process of procuring semiconductors from US chipmakers, including Nvidia Corp., and plans to add 1.9 gigawatts’ worth of data centers by 2030.

The companies didn’t share details on the location of the data center campus, its overall capacity, or the type of chips they plan to use. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration approved a plan to ship advanced semiconductors from Nvidia and AMD to the Gulf region, but it’s unclear if the firms got those approvals.

Humain counts companies like Qualcomm Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. as partners, and is in early talks with Elon Musk’s xAI on a data center deal in Saudi Arabia. Humain Ventures, a $10 billion fund, launched this summer and has started deploying capital.

Speaking at a separate FII panel, Amin said his goal is for Saudi Arabia to be the third-largest AI infrastructure provider, behind the US and China.

Its latest partnership marks “a pivotal moment in creating scalable, secure, and sustainable data center capacity to support the rapid growth of AI and cloud computing,” he said in the statement.