Saudi Arabia is building something Nvidia calls one of the biggest infrastructure shifts since the rise of cloud computing. They are called AI factories — purpose-built infrastructure designed to generate intelligence at scale, backed by the Public Investment Fund through Humain. Joining me on Zoom from Saudi Arabia is Sophie Guibaud, Nominee Director at IFC and Co-Chair of MFTA Saudi. Sophie, welcome back to Wall Street to Mena. Saudi Arabia is building what is being called AI factories. In simple terms, what is the actual difference between that and a regular data centre?
To make it very simple — an AI factory is still a data centre, but it is designed for a very different job. A conventional data centre supports a broad mix of workloads, including storage, websites, enterprise applications, and cloud services. An AI factory is optimised specifically for training and running AI models, with a huge concentration of GPUs, much faster networking, and far greater power and cooling requirements. The simplest way I think about it is this: a traditional data centre hosts digital services, while an AI factory turns data, compute, and energy into AI capability.
Humain is building up to 500MW of this infrastructure. Does that scale feel real yet?
It feels increasingly real. To make it more tangible — 500MW running continuously is roughly the annual electricity of 800,000 French households. We are talking about real industrial-scale power demand. And it is not only about this specific announcement — it is the whole ecosystem. On top of the Nvidia chips, there is also the AMD partnership targeting 500MW of AI capacity over the next five years with a $10 billion investment. There is also the Qualcomm one targeting 200MW of inference capacity starting in 2026. Bringing Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm into the same buildout is significant — Humain is signalling that it will work with the best global technology. That is what makes Saudi Arabia such an attractive market for global AI infrastructure.
Why does this matter so much for Vision 2030 and economic diversification away from oil?
Building data centres alone does not diversify the economy. The diversification happens as Saudi Arabia turns that infrastructure into companies, intellectual property, services, talent, and eventually exports. Finance is where it becomes very concrete — financial services are already a data industry. Saudi Arabia already has digital-native players like STC Bank, D360, Hala, and Tamara. AI is starting to appear inside the financial infrastructure itself. Last November, Tamara said that one of its AI tools reduced the processing time of fintech applications by more than 95%. If domestic, strong Arabic language models make it easier for banks to improve underwriting, compliance, and customer service locally, with greater controls over sensitive data, that is a strong accelerator for the whole ecosystem. And if international companies choose to work here because of that ecosystem, that is the real tie back to Vision 2030.
Nvidia's CEO compared AI to electricity and the internet. What do you think of that comparison?
The comparison holds on dependency but not yet on maturity. AI is becoming infrastructure that almost every industry will increasingly depend on — on that point, I fully agree. But electricity itself is a standardised utility. We do not care which technology produced the electron coming out of the socket. AI is nowhere close to that stage. The chip matters. The model matters. The software stack matters. The supplier is strategic. Export controls matter. Countries building sovereign AI infrastructure still depend heavily on a relatively small number of technology providers — which is exactly why programmes like Humain matter. They are about shifting from dependency on foreign providers toward ownership across the stack. So I would say AI is becoming essential infrastructure, but it is not yet a utility — and that distinction matters enormously when governments decide how much of the stack they want to control.
Where does this put Saudi Arabia in the AI race next to the US and China?
I do not think Saudi Arabia is trying to compete with the US and China in the exact same way. The US has the frontier AI models and much of the semiconductor ecosystem. China has enormous domestic technology capability, research talent, and its own model ecosystem. Saudi Arabia's advantages are very different — capital, energy, land, speed of infrastructure deployment, and the ability to make enormously large strategic investments. That can absolutely make Saudi Arabia one of the world's most significant AI compute hubs. But building the infrastructure is only the first step. The real question is how Saudi Arabia turns world-class infrastructure into locally created intelligence, models, applications, companies, IP, and talent that the world is using. And I believe that is what we will see unfold in the next few years.
Thank you so much, Sophie, for being with us today.
Thank you, thank you.
