Humain CEO Tareq Amin’s $3 billion investment in xAI positions Saudi Arabia at the center of a rapidly shifting global A.I. power structure. Photo by Amal Alhasan/Getty Images for Fortune Media
Tareq Amin, CEO of Saudi Arabia’s largest A.I. company, Humain, has been on a dealmaking blitz since taking the helm of the Kingdom’s national A.I. initiative last year. His latest move: a $3 billion investment in Elon Musk’s xAI. The investment was made during xAI’s $20 billion fundraising round in January, Humain announced today (Feb. 18). The raise came just weeks before xAI merged with Musk’s SpaceX earlier this month, as Musk consolidates his A.I., communications and space ambitions ahead of a widely anticipated IPO.
Founded in 2025 by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and backed by Saudi Arabia’s massive sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. Humain sits at the center of the Kingdom’s push to diversify its economy beyond oil. A core part of that mandate: building sovereign A.I. infrastructure at home.
The xAI stake is the latest example of Humain’s ability to “deploy meaningful capital behind exceptional opportunities where long-term vision, technical excellence and execution converge,” said Amin in a statement. Amin, who previously led Aramco Digital and Japan’s Rakuten Mobile, has spent the past several months striking blockbuster partnerships with U.S. tech heavyweights, including Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, Amazon Web Services and Groq (not xAI’s chatbot Grok).
Humain did not respond to requests for comment from Observer.
Most of the partnerships are focused on expanding Saudi Arabia’s data center footprint and compute capacity. A joint venture with AMD and Cisco, for example, aims to build domestic A.I. infrastructure capable of powering up to one gigawatt.
xAI’s relationship with Humain dates back to November, when the companies unveiled plans for a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia. The facility—xAI’s first outside the U.S.—will run on Nvidia chips and deploy the company’s Grok models across the Kingdom.
Humain’s deepening ties to xAI underscore a broader realignment in global A.I. alliances, with Gulf states emerging as critical capital providers and infrastructure hubs for American developers. In November, Humain and the United Arab Emirates’ A.I. company, G42, received U.S. approval to acquire up to 35,000 advanced A.I. chips each, marking a sharp reversal from earlier semiconductor export restrictions.
The Emirati-backed MGX has participated in large fundraising rounds for xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic, while Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund earlier this week joined Anthropic’s new $380 billion Series G financing—further cementing the Middle East’s growing influence over the future of A.I.
Nvidia has struck a non-exclusive licensing agreement with AI chip competitor Groq. As part of the deal, Nvidia will hire Groq founder Jonathan Ross, president Sunny Madra, and other employees.
CNBC reported that Nvidia is acquiring assets from Groq for $20 billion; Nvidia told TechCrunch that this is not an acquisition of the company and did not comment on the scope of the deal. But if CNBC’s numbers are accurate, this purchase is expected to be Nvidia’s largest ever, and with Groq on its side, Nvidia is poised to become even more dominant in chip manufacturing.
As tech companies compete to grow their AI capabilities, they need computing power, and Nvidia’s GPUs have emerged as the industry standard. But Groq has been working on a different type of chip called an LPU (language processing unit), which it has claimed can run LLMs at 10 times faster and using one-tenth the energy. Groq’s CEO Jonathan Ross is known for this sort of innovation — when he worked for Google, he helped invent the TPU (tensor processing unit), a custom AI accelerator chip.
In September, Groq raised $750 million at a $6.9 billion valuation. Its growth has been quick and significant — the company said that it powers the AI apps of more than 2 million developers, up from about 356,000 last year.
Updated, 12/24/25 at 5:40 p.m. ET, with clarification from Nvidia about the nature of the deal.
Technology’s new origin stories are emerging from hubs in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, India and Africa. Unsplash+
Since the 1960s, the story of technology has followed a familiar pattern. Innovation emerged in Silicon Valley garages, Boston laboratories or European cafés and gradually spread worldwide. Today, that pattern is changing. The future of tech is being equally developed in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bengaluru and Jakarta. Innovation is decentralizing, and not only in terms of infrastructure and investment but also through culture, religion and sovereignty. This new center of gravity is changing whose values will define the tools that the world will use tomorrow.
The Gulf’s ambitious tech push
The United Arab Emirates has quickly become one of the most assertive new players. In May, during President Trump’s visit, Abu Dhabi announced the release of Stargate UAE, a 10-square-mile A.I. campus spearheaded by G42. Once fully operational, it will be one of the largest A.I.-centered campuses in the world, with a planned five-gigawatt capacity and an initial 200-megawatt phase set for 2026.
Stargate will accommodate hundreds of thousands of advanced chips and is strategically located within a two-thousand-mile range of nearly half the global population. Framed as a U.S.-UAE partnership, the agreement eases previous export restrictions and charts a path for safe deployment. Cisco, SoftBank and American chipmakers have pledged support, signaling the UAE’s ambition to be not just a technology consumer but also a global authority in the A.I. ecosystem. The point was made plainly: Abu Dhabi is positioning itself as both a setter and consumer of standards.
The UAE push extends beyond hardware. It has invested billions in A.I.-driven government services designed to make public administration more predictive and efficient, including systems that assist civil servants in rapidly revising regulations. Language is also central to this strategy. The open model, Falcon Arabic, adapted to the nuances of the Arabic language, is a technological and cultural declaration. In the UAE, innovation is no longer about catching up. It’s about authorship, rooted in identity and scaled through global collaboration.
Saudi Arabia is making its own similarly bold statement. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) launched HUMAIN this year, a sovereign A.I. developing an entire stack of data centers, cloud infrastructure, language models and consumer applications. Already, the locally produced Allam-based Humain Chat serves millions of Arabic- and English-speaking users, with customized guardrails to reflect local values. More than a chatbot, this is an assertion of cultural and linguistic sovereignty.
The Kingdom supports this vision through funding and equipment. At LEAP 2025, American chipmaker that specializes in ultra-fast inference, Groq, announced a $1.5 billion expansion in Saudi Arabia, backed by the PIF. The initial large-scale HUMAIN data centers in Riyadh and Dammam, each with 100-megawatt capacity, will be launched in 2026. Alongside nearly $15 billion in additional A.I. investments announced concurrently, these steps indicate that Saudi Arabia’s goal is to become a compute powerhouse rather than a passive participant. Once talent can leverage local infrastructure in their own language, the innovation pipeline can begin at home.
India’s integration of tech with culture
India presents a complementary, yet distinct, vision. Digital products have transformed everyday life across the country. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) currently processes over 20 billion transactions monthly, enabling small ideas to scale rapidly in a nation of 1.4 billion people. During the 2025 Mahakumbh pilgrimage, A.I. tools managed flows to the tune of millions, with multilingual assistants helping navigate complex rituals. These examples illustrate how India integrates technology with cultural and religious life, making it feel less like an import and more like a facilitator of tradition. The IndiaAI Mission, a $1.2 billion initiative supporting shared compute and multilingual models, reduces barriers for startups and researchers nationwide. The resulting ecosystem combines scale, meaning and diversity, illustrating how technology can be adapted in local contexts while still fostering innovation.
Africa and the broader Global South
Decentralization extends beyond South Asia and the Gulf. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis in Nairobi is emerging as an intelligent city supporting startups, academia and research. Yet some of the regions’ most radical innovations are rural: A.I. tools assist farmers in forecasting weather and crop yields amid volatile climatic conditions.
In Nigeria, hubs in Lagos and Ilorin support startups designing voice systems attuned to African accents. These systems help deliver healthcare services or financial tools to farmers in local dialects. While these initiatives may appear modest in comparison to a five-gigawatt A.I. campus, they share a common DNA: locally relevant innovation aimed at solving real-world problems.
Across these regions, there is a common thread. Decentralization is not just the geographic spread of technology. It is the reshaping of technology itself. The Hajj in Makkah provides key lessons in crowd management, which have applications in emergency systems across the globe. India’s street market payment rails have become benchmarks for emerging economies. African voice tools expand inclusivity. Influence spreads because these innovations are practical and culturally attuned.
Challenges and the road ahead
Hurdles remain. Infrastructure must be built, maintained and operated effectively. Laws must protect privacy and rights without choking development. Talent pipelines require years to mature. Yet the trajectory is evident: projects like Stargeate and HUMAIN are not isolated experiments. They’re declarations that new centers of gravity in tech have arrived. India, Kenya and Nigeria show that cultural context—faith, language, community—is not an inhibitor of innovation, but a guide.
The decentralization of innovation signals a paradigm shift. Global technology will no longer emerge solely from historic powerhouses. Instead, it will reflect diverse cultural and social priorities, embedding meaning and relevance into the very tools that shape our future.
Yousef Khalili is the Global Chief Transformation Officer and CEO MEA at Quant, which develops cutting-edge digital employee technology.
AI chip startup Groq confirmed Wednesday that it raised a fresh $750 million in funding at a post-money valuation of $6.9 billion.
This topped the rumored numbers when word leaked in July that Groq was raising. At that time, reports suggested that the raise would be about $600 million, at near a $6 billion valuation.
Groq, which also sells data center computing power, previously raised $640 million at a $2.8 billion valuation in August 2024, making this more than double the valuation in about a year. Groq has now raised over $3 billion to date, PitchBook estimates.
Groq has been a hot commodity because it is working on breaking the chokehold that AI chip maker Nvidia has over the tech industry. Groq’s chips are not GPUs, the graphics processing units that typically power AI systems. Instead, Groq calls them LPUs, (language processing units) and calls its hardware an inference engine — specialized computers optimized for running AI models quickly and efficiently.
Its products are geared toward developers and enterprises, available as either a cloud service or an on-premises hardware cluster. The on-prem hardware is a server rack outfitted with a stack of its integrated hardware/software nodes. Both the cloud and on-prem hardware run open versions of popular models, like those from Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Google and OpenAI. Groq says its offerings maintain, or in some cases improve, AI performance at significantly less cost than alternatives.
Groq’s founder, Jonathan Ross, has a particularly relevant pedigree for this work. Ross previously worked at Google developing its Tensor Processing Unit chip, which are specialized processors designed for machine learning tasks. The TPU was announced in 2016, the same year Groq emerged from stealth. TPUs still power Google Cloud’s AI services.
Groq says it now powers the AI apps of more than 2 million developers, up from 356,000 developers when the company talked to TechCrunch a year ago.
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The new round was led by investment firm Disruptive, with additional funding from BlackRock, Neuberger Berman, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and others. Existing investors, including Samsung, Cisco, D1, and Altimeter, also joined the round.
