Behind Blackstone’s Funding in Saudi Arabia AI Data Centres

The global push for data centre capacity is only increasing as AI models demand ever more computing power.

Now Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds have positioned themselves as crucial sources of capital for a sector that burns through billions of dollars before a single server goes live.

As a result, Private equity firm Blackstone is now partnering with Humain, Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI company, in a US$3bn deal to build data centres across the kingdom. 

AirTrunk, the data centre operator owned by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will work with Humain to finance, develop and operate facilities that house the computer systems and storage equipment needed to run AI models.

How the deal is expected to grow beyond an initial US$3bn investment

Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain, makes clear in an interview on Tuesday that this is just the beginning. 

He says that the effort will likely grow and may eventually include other firms such as BlackRock, KKR and DigitalBridge Group.

Blackstone has spent years assembling a data centre empire worth roughly US$25bn. 

Last year alone, the firm paid about US$16bn for AirTrunk, which runs facilities across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Malaysia. 

These sites provide the infrastructure and industrial-scale cooling systems needed to keep thousands of servers running without overheating.

Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, cautions a warning that electricity to power them could be in “short supply”.

Humain was set up by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, just five months ago in May. 

PIF and Aramco, the state oil company, has also announce a non-binding term sheet for Aramco to buy a “significant minority stake” in the AI company.

Why Saudi Arabia eyes third place in global AI rankings

Humain has already broken ground on its first data centres in Saudi Arabia and expects them to be up and running early next year. 

The company is in the process of procuring semiconductors from US chipmakers, including Nvidia, which makes the graphics processing units (GPUs) that have become essential for training and running AI models. 

Tareq plans to add 1.9GW of data centre capacity by 2030.

The companies are yet to reveal where the data centre campus will be located, how much capacity it will have, or which chips they plan to use. 

Earlier this year, the Trump administration approved a plan to ship advanced semiconductors from Nvidia and AMD to the Gulf region, but it remains unclear if the firms got those approvals.

Humain has already lined up Qualcomm, the mobile chip company and Cisco Systems, the networking equipment manufacturer, as partners. 

The company is also in early talks with Elon Musk’s xAI on a data centre deal in Saudi Arabia. 

Humain Ventures, a US$10bn fund that launched this summer, has started deploying capital.

Speaking at a separate panel at the conference, Tareq lays out his ambition for Saudi Arabia to be “the third-largest AI infrastructure provider, behind the US and China”. 

The partnership, he says in the statement, marks “a pivotal moment in creating scalable, secure, and sustainable data center capacity to support the rapid growth of AI and cloud computing”.