The Saudi Arabian government's new artificial intelligence (AI) company, Humain, has broken ground on its first data centers in the region, with facilities in Riyadh and the Eastern Province’s Dammam expected to go live in the second quarter of 2026.

The data centers will have an initial capacity of 100MW each, CEO Tareq Amin said during an interview with Bloomberg, although he noted that the company is still in the process of procuring the chips for the sites from the US.

This includes the 18,000 GB300 chips Humain has purchased from Nvidia, with Armin saying that although the company has been granted local regulatory approval, the timeline for receiving the chips depends on “the governance and the protocols and the approval of the US government,” a process which he said the company would start going through “very, very soon.”

Humain is an AI venture established in May 2025 as a subsidiary of the country's Public Investment Fund (PIF) with the aim of delivering 6.6GW of data center capacity over the next decade.

In addition to the 18,000 Nvidia GB300 chips – of which "several hundred thousand" more are on the way, according to Humain – the company has also partnered with AWS for a $5 billion 'AI Zone,' signed a deal with AMD for 500MW of compute, and deployed Groq chips for inference.

It has also signed MoUs with Qualcomm and Cisco, and in July, it was reported that Elon Musk's xAI has held discussions with two potential partners in the Middle East, one of which is Humain.