Elon Musk said his artificial intelligence startup xAI plans to build a 500-megawatt data centre in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Humain, the kingdom’s state-backed AI venture.
Speaking at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington, Musk said the project would be powered by Nvidia Corp.’s chips.
Humain was established under Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Nvidia expands its own footprint
Alongside Musk’s announcement, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the chipmaker would support a separate 100-megawatt data centre project for Amazon Web Services.
Huang said the initiative comes “with a gigawatt ambition and counting,” underscoring the expanding demand for Nvidia’s products across hyperscale computing environments.
Both announcements highlighted the accelerating infrastructure build-out tied to advanced AI model development.
The disclosures followed the unveiling of a US-Saudi AI Memorandum of Understanding a day earlier.
According to the White House, the agreement provides the kingdom “access to world-leading American systems while protecting US technology from foreign influence.”
Visions of a robotics-driven future
Musk and Huang appeared together on stage with Abdullah Alswaha, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology.
During the discussion, Musk laid out expansive predictions for AI’s future, emphasising the rise of robotics and the evolution of computing infrastructure beyond Earth.
“Humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever,” Musk said, adding that such machines would eventually make work optional.
The remarks prompted applause at the Kennedy Centre, where the forum was held.
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Musk predicted rapid evolution in AI computing economics, saying that “perhaps in the four or five-year time frame, the lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar-powered AI satellites.”
He initially misstated the scale of xAI’s Saudi data centre plan, momentarily referring to it as a 500-gigawatt facility before clarifying that such a project would cost “eight bazillion trillion dollars.”
Musk has been heavily investing in xAI following his split with OpenAI, the company he helped create.
xAI, which develops the chatbot Grok, is competing with both OpenAI and Anthropic to train larger models, secure vast computing resources and raise capital.
The Saudi data center plan marks the latest step in Musk’s push to scale the company’s infrastructure as the global race in AI accelerates.
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