Aramco Closes Its $2.6 Billion Deal for 49% of HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia's National AI Company

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia - The world’s biggest oil company now owns nearly half of Saudi Arabia’s national AI company. Aramco and the Public Investment Fund, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, said on Sunday that they had closed a deal under which Aramco, through a wholly owned subsidiary, takes a 49% stake in HUMAIN. PIF keeps the other 51%.

Aramco is contributing about 9.9 billion riyals ($2.6 billion) in cash during 2026, plus its own AI, computing and digital assets, according to the companies’ joint statement. The closing formalizes a non-binding term sheet the two signed on Oct. 28, 2025, Arab News reported.

Screenshot: @aramco on X

HUMAIN launched in May 2025 and is trying to build what the companies call a full-stack AI business: data centers, high-performance computing and cloud platforms, AI models including ALLaM, an Arabic large language model, and AI services for government and industry. Its target is 3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2030, and it wants to become one of the world’s leading exporters of AI.

For Aramco, part of the logic is its own operations. The company said it expects to use HUMAIN’s infrastructure to bring AI into its industrial work and to make more money from AI and digital assets it already owns. “Since 2023, Aramco has achieved $11.3 billion in Technology Realized Value, with a significant portion coming from AI solutions,” Aramco president and chief executive Amin Nasser said. He called the deal “very important to Aramco.”

Screenshot: @aramco on X

PIF described the deal as a way to pull its AI holdings together. “Bringing PIF and Aramco’s AI portfolio of investments together under HUMAIN creates a powerful synergy that fuels talent growth, technological advancement, and intellectual property creation,” said Yazeed Al-Humied, PIF’s deputy governor and head of Middle East and North Africa investments.

HUMAIN has started lining up foreign customers. On Oct. 21, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced a preliminary framework agreement with the AI cloud company Nebius, which would take up to 50 megawatts at a planned campus in Oxagon, part of Neom, according to Arab News. That is half of the first 100 megawatts now under construction, and the capacity is expected to come online in phases from the fourth quarter of 2027.

The timing stands out. The deal closed at the end of a week in which investors questioned whether Big Tech’s spending on data centers and chips will pay off, and OpenAI cut its funding round to $20 billion after a tepid response. Gulf money has been one of the steadier sources of capital for AI, with investors from the United Arab Emirates leading OpenAI’s round. With this deal, Saudi Arabia’s biggest company is putting part of its oil earnings behind the same bet.