Amazon partners in $5B joint investment in Saudi Arabia AI capabilities
Amazon is significantly increasing its commitment to helping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia develop its artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud subsidiary of Amazon and Humain, Saudi Arabia’s newly-created company dedicated to developing AI across the country and globally, have announced plans to invest more than $5 billion in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia.
This first-of-a-kind initiative will bring together multiple components, including dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers with semiconductors, AWS UltraCluster networks for faster AI training and inference, AWS AI services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as the Amazon Q generative AI assistant.
This partnership follows Amazon’s previous announcement it will launch an AWS infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026. As part of that long-term commitment, AWS plans to invest more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia.
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The new AWS Region will consist of three availability zones at launch and AWS will continue to scale its training programs and help accelerate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goal of empowering women to increase participation in the workforce.
"This collaboration to build an AI Zone in Saudi Arabia will enable innovations across all industries using AWS’s advanced AI offerings and reflects our commitment to support Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030," said Matt Garman, CEO, Amazon Web Services, in a corporate blog post. "Together, we will empower customers with cost-effective and secure cloud technologies, fuel innovation and economic growth across the nation, and enable Humain to appeal to customers globally."
The new AI Zone is an additional investment to grow global and local demand for advanced AI services in Saudi Arabia. In addition, Humain plans to develop AI solutions using AWS technologies for its end customers and will work with AWS on the development of a unified AI agent marketplace intended to streamline the discovery, deployment, and management of AI software for the Saudi Arabia government.
"We thank AWS for doubling down on their long-term partnership with the Kingdom," said His Excellency Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, minister of communications and IT, Saudi Arabia. "This new collaboration with Humain lays the foundation for the intelligent era, accelerates our innovation momentum, grows our talent, and reinforces Saudi Arabia’s position as a global partner of choice in the age of AI."
The collaboration also intends to spur the growth of large language models (LLMs), including Arabic large language models (ALLaM), while spearheading wide adoption of AI in organizations and industries across the Gulf Region and beyond. AWS and Humain will also work together to advance an AI-powered startup sector in Saudi Arabia.
"Humain’s partnership with AWS is a pivotal moment in Saudi Arabia's journey to become a global leader in AI," said Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain. "By leveraging AWS’s world-class cloud infrastructure and AI expertise and Humain’s full-stack AI capabilities, we are creating an offering that will attract global investment and talent, thereby driving our digital transformation agenda forward."
