\n Saudi Arabia is strengthening its ties with American AI companies \u2014 announcing a flurry of new joint ventures worth billions of dollars. The country seeks to make its mark in the AI industry as its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, makes his first visit to the United States in years.\n <\/p>\n
\n Humain \u2014 an AI company backed by Saudi Arabia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund<\/a> \u2014 announced a series of partnerships with prominent American tech companies, including xAI, Cisco, AMD and Qualcomm, during a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington on Wednesday.\n <\/p>\n \n Saudi Arabia is trying to further firm up ties with the United States and shift its economy away from oil<\/a>. For American companies, the Middle Eastern country answers three urgent problems for AI expansion: funding, space and cheap energy.\n <\/p>\n \n Elon Musk announced at Wednesday\u2019s event that xAI, his AI company<\/a>, will develop a huge data center in Saudi Arabia alongside Humain. The planned 500-megawatt data center would be xAI\u2019s first large-scale center outside of the United States, and the partnership will see xAI\u2019s Grok chatbot<\/a> deployed throughout Saudi Arabia.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe future of intelligence will be engineered through massive and efficient compute combined with the most advanced AI models,\u201d Musk said in a statement on Wednesday.\n <\/p>\n \n The center will be powered by chips from Nvidia, whose founder, Jensen Huang, sat alongside Musk and Saudi Arabian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswaha at Wednesday\u2019s panel. No further details about the partnership were revealed.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is how we walk the talk in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in partnership with the US,\u201d Alswaha said. \u201cYesterday, the president and his royal highness announced the AI strategic framework and partnership. Today we\u2019re going big with Elon and Jensen, so thank you for those opportunities.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Bloomberg reported<\/a> on Wednesday that the United States is set to approve the first sales of advanced AI chips to Humain.\n <\/p>\n \n At the event, Alswaha announced a 100-megawatt data center for Amazon Web Services \u201cwith a gigawatt ambition\u201d that also will be powered by Nvidia\u2019s infrastructure. AWS said in a statement that it plans \u201cto provide, deploy and manage up to 150,000 AI accelerators\u201d in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia.\n <\/p>\n \n As AI companies expand, their huge data centers need space<\/a> and massive energy sources<\/a>. Many data centers are being built in the United States, including xAI\u2019s Colossus in Memphis<\/a>. However, there\u2019s fear that China will beat out the United States when it comes to energy production<\/a> to power AI systems. Saudi Arabia could help with that \u2014 it has much easier access to the space and energy needed to power these massive ventures.\n <\/p>\n \n The investment from Saudi Arabia also plays a major part in Prince bin Salman\u2019s redemption in the United States, following being labeled a \u201cpariah\u201d by President Joe Biden<\/a> for his role in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n During his Oval Office visit on Wednesday, Prince bin Salman claimed the country will be investing $1 trillion dollars in the United States, a substantial increase from the previously announced $600 billion investment in May. The comments surprised even President Donald Trump in the moment, although the timeline of the investments is not clear.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou\u2019re saying to me now that the $600 billion will be $1 trillion?\u201d Trump said to Prince bin Salman in the Oval Office. \u201cGood. I like that very much.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saudi Arabia is strengthening its ties with American AI companies \u2014 announcing a flurry of new joint ventures…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-302108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}