AMD, Cisco, and HUMAIN — a Public Investment Fund (PIF) company specializing in comprehensive full-stack AI solutions — announced plans to establish a groundbreaking joint venture that aims to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s rise as a global hub for world-class artificial intelligence infrastructure and services. This announcement marks a major milestone in the Kingdom’s broader digital transformation agenda and reinforces its ambitions to lead the next wave of AI innovation across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond.
The joint venture will bring together three of the world’s most influential technology players:
- AMD, known for its high-performance computing and AI accelerators,
- Cisco, a leader in secure and scalable networking and critical infrastructure, and
- HUMAIN, a rapidly emerging AI platform provider backed by the Saudi PIF.
Together, they will deliver advanced AI infrastructure solutions designed to serve regional enterprises, global cloud providers, public-sector institutions, and AI innovators.
A Joint Venture Designed to Power the Next Era of Large-Scale AI
AMD, Cisco, and HUMAIN will act as founding investors in the new joint venture, which is expected to formally begin operations in 2026. The venture’s mission is clear: to combine HUMAIN’s modern, high-efficiency data center footprint with AMD’s leadership in compute and Cisco’s expertise in critical networking and infrastructure to create one of the world’s most advanced AI ecosystems.
The companies plan to develop up to 1 gigawatt (1 GW) of AI infrastructure capacity by 2030, making the joint venture one of the largest AI infrastructure initiatives ever undertaken in the region. This capacity will support AI model training, inference, high-performance computing, and next-generation digital services at an unprecedented scale.
Both AMD and Cisco will serve as exclusive technology partners, contributing their full portfolios of products, solutions, and engineering expertise to give the venture strong foundations in performance, resilience, energy efficiency and cost-effective scaling.
The first major project under the joint venture will be a 100-megawatt (MW) AI infrastructure deployment, incorporating:
- HUMAIN’s hyperscale-ready data centers,
- AMD Instinct™ MI450 Series GPUs, AMD’s next-generation data center accelerators engineered for large-scale AI training, and
- Cisco’s industry-leading networking and data center infrastructure.
This initial phase is designed to serve as a blueprint for the venture’s larger 1 GW buildout.
Powering Saudi Arabia’s AI-Driven Economy
Saudi Arabia has outlined ambitious plans to lead global AI innovation and become a world-class digital economy. Earlier this year, AMD and Cisco jointly announced an initiative with HUMAIN to create one of the world’s most open, scalable, and cost-efficient AI compute platforms.
Today’s announcement builds on that momentum — taking the collaboration from a strategic partnership to a more formal, long-term investment through the creation of a joint venture. The new entity will not only deploy AI infrastructure at scale but will also provide the technological backbone needed to power the Kingdom’s rapidly expanding AI ecosystem.
Leadership Perspectives on the Partnership
Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD, emphasized the importance of deep partnerships in enabling global-scale AI innovation.
Delivering high-performance global AI infrastructure at scale requires strong partnerships. Together with HUMAIN and Cisco, we’re combining leadership compute and networking technologies to expand the capacity and global competitiveness of the Kingdom’s AI ecosystem. As part of this deepening collaboration, we’re also establishing an AMD Center of Excellence in Saudi Arabia to further accelerate local integration and innovation.
Her comments highlight AMD’s commitment not only to providing hardware but also nurturing local talent and technical capacity.
Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco, described the joint venture as a pivotal moment in the Kingdom’s digital evolution.
Our expanded partnership with HUMAIN, together with AMD, will mark a pivotal moment in accelerating Saudi Arabia’s AI infrastructure. By providing secure, scalable, critical infrastructure for HUMAIN’s up to 1 GW buildout, Cisco will help the Kingdom turn its vision for a digitally advanced, AI-powered economy into a reality.
Cisco’s role underscores the necessity of secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure for AI systems operating at multi-megawatt and multi-petabyte scales.
Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, reinforced how the joint venture represents a bold step forward for the Kingdom’s global AI competitiveness.
Our partnership with AMD and Cisco brings world-class technology and expertise to our mission. Together, we are pushing the frontier of AI compute, bringing up to 1 GW of high-performance, cost-efficient infrastructure online in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to empower innovators both in the Kingdom and around the world.
His statement reflects HUMAIN’s mission to transform Saudi Arabia into a key global provider of AI services, not just a consumer of them.
Building an AI Ecosystem for Global Innovation
Saudi Arabia’s bold push into AI is supported by strong indicators of local demand. According to Cisco’s latest AI Readiness Index:
- 91% of organizations in the Kingdom plan to deploy AI agents or AI-driven services.
- Only 29% currently have access to the GPU capacity they need to support these initiatives.
This gap between ambition and available infrastructure underscores the importance of the joint venture. The Kingdom’s public organizations, private enterprises, and research institutions all require significantly more high-performance compute capacity to train, deploy, and scale advanced AI models.
The joint venture aims to solve this problem at national scale by:
- Providing affordable, scalable access to AI compute
- Supporting global and sovereign AI model development
- Enhancing data center efficiency to lower operational costs
- Building a resilient infrastructure backbone for AI innovation
- Localizing technology integration skills, data science talent, and AI research capability
In doing so, the initiative aligns directly with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which emphasizes economic diversification, digital transformation, and leadership in technologies of the future.
HUMAIN’s Role: A Next-Generation AI Infrastructure Provider
HUMAIN, backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, is rapidly emerging as a major player in the global AI landscape. Its core focus is developing full-stack AI solutions, from chips and data centers to large-scale AI model development and enterprise deployments.
In this joint venture, HUMAIN contributes:
- Its hyperscale-ready modern data centers
- Local engineering talent
- Operational expertise in AI and cloud platforms
- Regional market access and customer ecosystems
By integrating AMD accelerators and Cisco’s networking, HUMAIN will deliver data centers optimized for:
- Low-latency AI training
- Massive GPU clusters
- Sustainable power consumption
- Lower capital and operational expenditure
- Rapid deployment of new AI services
The synergy between the three organizations enables a balanced and complete value stack covering compute, networking, software, and real-world AI workloads.
Scaling to 1 Gigawatt of AI Infrastructure by 2030
The long-term vision for the joint venture is ambitious: up to 1 GW of AI compute operating within Saudi Arabia by the end of the decade.
To put this into perspective, 1 GW of AI infrastructure can support:
- Thousands of large foundation models
- Extensive enterprise AI workloads
- Global AI cloud services exported internationally
- Regional AI innovation across finance, healthcare, energy, logistics and more
This scale places Saudi Arabia on a trajectory to become one of the world’s foremost AI infrastructure hubs.
A Catalyst for an AI-Powered Digital Economy
The joint venture represents a significant step forward for Saudi Arabia’s AI aspirations. By bringing together three global technology leaders, the collaboration will:
- Address the Kingdom’s growing demand for AI compute
- Enable AI adoption across industries
- Strengthen the robustness and sovereignty of local AI infrastructure
- Support global customers seeking scalable AI solutions
- Create high-tech jobs and nurture local engineering talent
- Position Saudi Arabia as a global exporter of AI services and innovation
As the world enters a new era defined by AI-driven transformation, AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN are constructing the critical foundations needed to ensure the Kingdom has a resilient, world-leading AI infrastructure capable of meeting the needs of both today and the future.
Source Link:https://www.amd.com/
