Saudi oil giant Aramco buys 49% of the kingdom's AI company HUMAIN
Aramco pays about $2.6 billion in cash plus its own AI and computing assets; HUMAIN has big chip deals with Nvidia and AMD.
Saudi Aramco, the state-controlled oil company and one of the world's biggest energy producers, has completed its purchase of 49% of HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's national AI company, the Saudi Press Agency reported Sunday.
Aramco is paying about 9.9 billion riyals, or $2.6 billion, in cash this year and adding its own AI, computing and digital assets. The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia's government investment fund, keeps the other 51%. HUMAIN is privately held, so there is no stock price or shareholder premium to compare. Neither company mentioned job cuts.
About HUMAIN
The fund launched HUMAIN in May 2025. It builds data centers, runs cloud computing services and makes ALLaM, an AI model built for Arabic. It plans 3 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2030 and wants to sell AI services abroad.
HUMAIN is a big customer of Bay Area chipmakers. In 2025, Santa Clara's Nvidia said HUMAIN's first phase would use 18,000 of its top AI chips, and AMD announced a $10 billion partnership with it.
Why Aramco wants it
Aramco plans to use HUMAIN's AI in its oil and gas operations and earn money from AI tools it built in-house, according to the agency. Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said the company has already gained $11.3 billion since 2023 by putting its own technology to work, much of it AI. That number is Aramco's own yardstick, which it calls "Technology Realized Value": the money it saved or the extra revenue it brought in by using tools it developed itself. Aramco says the figure is checked independently.
Source: Saudi Press Agency, Nov. 1, 2026, Aramco investor page, Nvidia, May 13, 2025 and AMD, May 13, 2025.