The alliance of Elon Musk and Saudi Arabia; Building the largest artificial intelligence data center outside the United States

The relationship between Elon Musk and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has entered a new phase. The two, who previously worked closely together during the acquisition of Twitter (now X), now plan to revolutionize the world’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. Elon Musk announced at the US-Saudi Investment Forum that his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, is planning a 500 MW data center build in Saudi Arabia.

According to the New York Times, this facility will be the world’s largest data center outside of the United States. This project is implemented in the form of a joint collaboration between xAI and the Saudi government artificial intelligence startup Humain. Nvidia will also be responsible for providing the processors of this center. This agreement is part of a larger cooperation package between American and Saudi companies.

Extensive cooperation between Elon Musk and Saudi Arabia

This cooperation is considered a win-win deal for the parties, which is rooted in their mutual needs; Elon Musk needs huge infrastructure to develop Grok chatbot and compete with OpenAI. He previously built a 300 megawatt data center in Memphis, but the Saudi project is much larger in scale. Saudi Arabia provides him with the land, abundant energy and fiber optic infrastructure necessary for rapid development.

On the other hand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is trying to save its economy from dependence on oil and become a technology hub. Humain’s goal is to manage 6% of the world’s artificial intelligence processing in the coming years, and the construction of this data center is a big step in this direction.

Currently, US export restrictions prevent the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia. But it seems that with political changes in the White House, these obstacles will be removed. “Tareq Amin”, the head of Humain, has pledged not to cooperate with Chinese companies such as Huawei in order to gain the trust of the Trump administration. The new US government is expected to issue the necessary permits to help the company achieve its goal of installing 400,000 artificial intelligence chips by 2030.