Jacky
Nvidia and xAI jointly announced on Wednesday that Saudi Arabia is building a large-scale data center equipped with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, and Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI will be its first customer.
Both Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum held in Washington, D.C.
This collaboration is based on a partnership the two parties reached in May this year—at that time, Nvidia stated it would provide chips with a total power consumption of 500 megawatts to Saudi Arabia’s Humain company. On Wednesday, Humain further revealed that the data center project will be equipped with approximately 600,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs).
Founded this year, Humain is owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The plan to build this data center was first announced when Huang accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump on a visit to Saudi Arabia.
“Imagine a startup with approximately $0 in revenue now building a data center for Elon,” Huang said.
This data center is one of the typical practical cases of the “sovereign AI” concept advocated by Nvidia. Nvidia stated that countries’ demand for AI data centers will grow increasingly to safeguard national security and cultural heritage. For Nvidia, this also means that besides a handful of hyperscale cloud service providers, its high-priced AI chips are expected to tap into a potentially huge market.
Huang’s attendance at an event supported by President Trump reflects, from a side angle, the current administration’s emphasis on the AI sector. Currently, Nvidia is actively lobbying to obtain permits for exporting next-generation AI chips, and in this process, Huang’s relationship with President Trump has grown increasingly close.
Musk is a key figure in the early days of Trump’s second administration. When announcing this cooperation agreement, he briefly confused the unit for the data center’s scale. He also joked that plans to build a data center with a scale 1,000 times larger “will have to wait a little longer.”
“That would cost 8 trillion trillion dollars,” Musk quipped.
Humain is not solely using Nvidia chips. AMD and Qualcomm will also sell chips and AI systems to it. AMD CEO Lisa Su and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon both attended a state dinner held on Tuesday in honor of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
AMD stated that by 2030, the total power consumption of the chips it provides may reach 1 gigawatt, and the supplied chips will be the Instinct MI450 GPUs designed for the AI field; in addition, Cisco will provide additional infrastructure support for the data center.
Qualcomm, on the other hand, will sell Humain its next-generation data center chips—AI200 and AI250—first released in October this year. Qualcomm said Humain will deploy Qualcomm chips with a total power consumption of 200 megawatts.
