Aramco completes its purchase of 49% of Saudi AI company HUMAIN, putting in about $2.6 billion in cash

Saudi Aramco has completed its acquisition of a 49% stake in HUMAIN, the artificial intelligence company owned by the Public Investment Fund, according to a joint statement from PIF and Aramco on November 1 reported by Arab News. Aramco holds the stake through a wholly owned subsidiary and will contribute approximately SR9.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in cash to HUMAIN during 2026, along with its own AI, computing and digital assets. PIF keeps the remaining 51%. The closing formalizes a non-binding term sheet the two signed on October 28, 2025. No valuation was disclosed, and Universal Asset Owners notes that the release names no outside co-investor and describes the cash going into HUMAIN, with no payment to PIF.

What HUMAIN is building

HUMAIN launched in May 2025 and works across data centers, cloud and high-performance computing, AI models including the Arabic language model ALLaM, and AI services for companies and government. Arab News reports it targets 3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2030. Universal Asset Owners lists a 1.7 gigawatt target for 2027 and 6 gigawatts by 2034, and cites CEO Tareq Amin naming xAI and Amazon Web Services as customers. In October, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced a preliminary framework under which Nebius would take up to 50 megawatts at the Oxagon campus in Neom, with operations starting in phases from the fourth quarter of 2027, per Arab News.

Aramco expects to use HUMAIN's infrastructure to deploy AI across its industrial operations. "This partnership with PIF strengthens Aramco's position as a global technology leader and AI powerhouse," Aramco president and CEO Amin Nasser said. Universal Asset Owners points out that the cash is small next to the build-out, which is meant to be funded mainly through debt and outside funds; it cites the publication Enterprise putting the 2027 build alone at around $20 billion. Amin has said: "When you have bankable off-take deals, raising capital for me is not an issue."

Why it matters

Saudi Arabia is assembling an AI compute supplier with its state oil company and sovereign fund behind it, and with US model makers and clouds as named customers. For businesses with operations or customers in the Middle East, that should eventually mean more local capacity and more options for keeping data in the region. The figures to rely on are the ones already built. Three gigawatts is a 2030 target, the Nebius capacity is a preliminary framework for 2027, and most of the money still has to be borrowed or raised, so any plan that depends on this capacity should have a fallback.