Elon Musk’s xAI will be first customer for Nvidia-backed data center in Saudi Arabia

Elon Musk’s xAI will be first customer for Nvidia-backed data center in Saudi Arabia


Tesla CEO Elon Musk (L) talks with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 19, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee | Getty Images

Nvidia and xAI said on Wednesday that a large data center facility being built in Saudi Arabia and equipped with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips will count Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup as its first customer.

Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang were both in attendance at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C.

The announcement builds on a partnership from May, when Nvidia said it would provide Saudi Arabia’s Humain with chips that use 500 megawatts of power. On Wednesday, Humain said the project would include about 600,000 Nvidia graphics processing units.

Humain was launched earlier this year and is owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. The plan to build the data center was initially announced when Huang visited Saudi Arabia alongside President Donald Trump.

“Could you imagine, a startup company approximately 0 billion dollars in revenues, now going to build a data center for Elon,” Huang said.

The facility is one of the most prominent examples of what Nvidia calls “sovereign AI.” The chipmaker has said that nations will increasingly need to build data centers for AI in order to protect national security and their culture. It’s also a potentially massive market for Nvidia’s pricey AI chips beyond a handful of hyperscalers.

Huang’s appearance at an event supported by President Trump is another sign of the administration’s focus on AI. Huang has become friendly with the president as Nvidia lobbies to gain licenses to ship future AI chips to China.

When announcing the agreement, Musk, who was a major figure in the early days of the second Trump administration, briefly mixed up the size of the data center, which is measured in megawatts, a unit of power. He joked that plans for a data center that would be 1,000 times larger would have to wait.

“That will be eight bazillion, trillion dollars,” Musk joked.

Humain won’t just use Nvidia chips. Advanced Micro Devices and Qualcomm will also sell chips and AI systems to Humain. AMD CEO Lisa Su and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon both attended a state dinner on Tuesday to honor Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

AMD will provide chips that may require as much as 1 gigawatt of power by 2030. The company said the chips that it would provide are its Instinct MI450 GPUs for AI. Cisco will provide additional infrastructure for the data center, AMD said.

Qualcomm will sell Humain its new data center chips that were first revealed in October, called the AI200 and AI250. Humain will deploy 200 megawatts of Qualcomm chips, the company said.

WATCH: Qualcomm CEO on new AI chips

Qualcomm CEO on new AI chips: Trying to prepare for the next phase of AI data center growth



Source

Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis speak out against data center boom. It’s a bad sign for AI industry
Technology

Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis speak out against data center boom. It’s a bad sign for AI industry

Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis agree on virtually nothing. But they found common ground this year as leading skeptics of the artificial intelligence industry’s data center boom. The alignment of two national figures on the left and right signals that a political reckoning is brewing over the AI industry’s impact […]

Read More
Dust to data centers: The year AI tech giants, and billions in debt, began remaking the American landscape
Technology

Dust to data centers: The year AI tech giants, and billions in debt, began remaking the American landscape

The Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images West Texas dust, iron-tinged and orange-red, rides the wind and sticks like a film to everything you touch. It clings to skin and the inside of your mouth, a fine grit that turns every […]

Read More
How 0 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia chips were allegedly smuggled into China
Technology

How $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia chips were allegedly smuggled into China

On Dec. 8, Federal prosecutors in Texas unsealed documents that revealed an investigation into a massive smuggling network that stretched across the U.S. and the world. Dubbed “Operation Gatekeeper” by the feds, the investigation wasn’t focused on drug smuggling or stolen goods but rather an alleged secret, underground network of suppliers for Nvidia‘s graphic processing […]

Read More