Saudi Arabia courts both US and Chinese AI stacks as HUMAIN unveils MiniMax-based Arabic tech
Saudi Arabia is building AI infrastructure with both American and Chinese partners, according to Semafor Net Zero.
At Riyadh's LEAP conference this month, state-backed HUMAIN unveiled Arabic technology built on a model from China's MiniMax, Semafor reported. HUMAIN is building its infrastructure with American technology and has agreed that Chinese frontier models will not be trained on computing capacity it obtains through US export approvals, per the same report.
AWS alone has committed $5.3 billion to data centers in the kingdom, according to Semafor.
DataVolt is constructing a roughly $1 billion, 100-megawatt facility at NEOM designed to export compute, with ambitions to expand to 360 megawatts, Semafor reported.
On the Chinese side, ByteDance's cloud arm is building infrastructure in Riyadh, and Tencent Cloud has secured a Saudi operating license, per the same report.
Source: semafor.com (opens in a new tab)1 sourcePermalink