The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is seeing its AI sector accelerated following a new partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform provider, and HUMAIN, the global artificial intelligence company. Working together, the two companies have announced they plan to invest over $5billion in an ‘AI Zone’.
The AI Zone will bring a multitude of benefits to the region through AWS’ AI infrastructure and servers with semiconductors, UltraCluster networks for faster AI training and inference. Specifically, AWS‘ services like Sagemaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as Amazon Q will play a pivotal role in advancing the Kingdom’s AI sector.
With Amazon Bedrock in Saudi Arabia, businesses and government organisations can access high-performing models from AI companies to develop genAI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Amazon Q is a coding assistant that enables organisations to build genAI-powered assistants to answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and complete tasks based on enterprise data.
“This collaboration to build an AI Zone in Saudi Arabia will enable innovations across all industries using AWS’s advanced AI offerings, and reflects our commitment to support Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030,” said Matt Garman, CEO, Amazon Web Services. “Together, we will empower customers with cost-effective and secure cloud technologies, fuel innovation and economic growth across the nation, and enable HUMAIN to appeal to customers globally.”
This move by AWS comes after it announced that it would be building AWS infrastructure in the Kingdom, investing $5.3billion (approx. 19.88 billion Saudi royal), which is estimated to become available in 2026.
In line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030
The announcement between AWS and HUMAIN aligns with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and builds upon the Kingdom’s pledge in 2024 to invest in building an AI-powered economy, representing a significant step towards realising Saudi Arabia’s ambitions to become a global AI leader.
Through its collaboration with AWS, HUMAIN plans to develop AI solutions using its partner’s technologies for its end customers. Further, HUMAIN will work with AWS on the development of a unified AI agent marketplace, simplifying the discovery, deployment, and management of AI software for the Saudi Arabia government.
“HUMAIN’s partnership with AWS is a pivotal moment in Saudi Arabia’s journey to become a global leader in AI,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “By leveraging AWS’s world-class cloud infrastructure and AI expertise and HUMAIN’s full-stack AI capabilities, we are creating an offering that will attract global investment and talent, thereby driving our digital transformation agenda forward.”
The partnership also intends to spur the growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Arabic Large Language Models (ALLaM), while spearheading wide adoption of AI in organisations and industries across the Gulf Region and beyond.
Commending both AWS and HUMAIN on the AI Zone, His Excellency Eng. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said: “We thank AWS for doubling down on their long-term partnership with the Kingdom. This new collaboration with HUMAIN lays the foundation for the intelligent era, accelerates our innovation momentum, grows our talent, and reinforces Saudi Arabia’s position as a global partner of choice in the age of AI.”
Further benefits for the Kingdom’s startups
Key sectors, such as government, energy, healthcare, and education, will be able to accelerate their transformation, envisioning AI-powered tools that can personalise learning experiences for students, help provide early disease diagnoses for patients, and unleash productivity across core upstream and downstream processes for government administration.
Use cases such as these will be accelerated via the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center innovation-centre, in partnership with HUMAIN, enabling customers – from the fastest-growing startups and largest enterprises to government agencies – to amplify genAI roadmaps and workloads, leading to equitable and efficient delivery of vital services for greater societal impact.
Additionally, the partnership will help founders and entrepreneurs scale their businesses in Saudi Arabia by utilising tools and programmes such as AWS Activate Build Your Startup.
AWS has helped more than 330,000 startups globally bring their business ideas to life. Its scalable, secure, low-cost cloud solutions and AI-powered services, combined with HUMAIN’s deep support network, will help supercharge Saudi’s startup scene. According to MAGNiTT, Saudi Arabia startups secured US$750 million venture capital funding in 2024, the highest share of capital deployed across the Middle East and North Africa last year.
Scaling training and talent development
As part of its long-term commitment to fast-track cloud adoption in Saudi Arabia, AWS is scaling its training and certification programmes focused on genAI skills-building. Working with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), AWS has committed to train 100,000 citizens from the Kingdom in cloud computing and genAI, focusing on the two newest AWS genAI certifications: AWS AI Practitioner and AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate Certifications.
In addition, to help accelerate Saudi Arabia’s goal of empowering women to increase participation in the workforce, AWS in 2024 also launched an upskilling program, ‘AWS Saudi Arabia Women’s Skills Initiative’, in partnership with Skillsoft Global Knowledge. AWS has committed to train 10,000 women on AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, at no charge, through classroom trainings with AWS-certified professionals.
