Saudi Arabia launches Humain to develop AI, may seek US partnership and favour from Donald Trump

The nation that gained wealth from oil is now tapping into data rather than crude. According to a Reuters report, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has initiated a new enterprise named Humain (that’s not a mistake) to develop artificial intelligence technologies within the nation.

The AI firm is included in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 initiative, which seeks to lessen the nation’s reliance on oil. In this endeavor, Saudi Arabia will allegedly seek assistance from the US and a favor from Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the US President arrived in Saudi Arabia, marking the initial stop of his Middle East journey.

Humain is led by the Crown Prince himself and is supported by Saudi Arabia’s substantial Public Investment Fund, valued at an impressive $940 billion.

What is the objective of Humain (clearly aside from creating AI)? The company is said to be preparing to launch significant infrastructure such as advanced data centers, cloud services, and high-performance computing systems. Its main initiative: a substantial language model that comprehends Arabic and is specifically designed for users in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East.

And the timing couldn’t be better. The Saudi data center market is rapidly expanding — it’s projected to nearly triple in size by the decade’s close, increasing from $1.33 billion in 2024 to close to $4 billion by 2030.

When it comes to tech giants, Saudi Arabia is indeed looking to the west, quite literally. The introduction of Humain is a segment of a broader charm initiative focused on collaborating with American firms and investors. The Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh this week is expected to resemble a gathering from Silicon Valley, with prominent figures such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg anticipated to be present.

And then there’s the aspect of Trump. Although not officially acknowledged, there is increasing conjecture that Saudi Arabia might be anticipating a more amiable White House in 2025 to facilitate better future partnerships. A stronger connection with Donald Trump might lead to increased opportunities for technology collaborations, investment authorizations, and regulatory backing from the United States.

Additionally, Saudi Arabia is collaborating with chip manufacturers Groq and Cerebras, and is constructing what could potentially become the largest AI inference data center in the world, as stated in a Forbes report. Humain is expected to be led by Tareq Amin, a former executive from Aramco Digital and Rakuten.

Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince has cautioned that AI and zero-click search outcomes might ruin the internet’s functionality and revenue model that has persisted for the last 15 years. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince stated that the growth of AI and shifts in online search behavior are making it more difficult for websites to attract visitors, resulting in lower earnings for content creators.

“AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search. One way or another, search drives everything that happens online,” he said.

Prince explained how this shift began with Google. A decade ago, Google search results used to lead people to other websites. “If you look back 10 years ago, if you did a search on Google you got back a list of 10 blue links,” he said. Back then, for every two pages that Google scraped from a website, it sent one visitor to that site. “Scrape two pages, get one visitor. And that was the trade.” But today, it’s a different story. Google still scrapes at the same rate, but now it takes six scraped pages to get just one visitor.

According to Prince, most users now get their answers right on Google’s search results page. “Today, 75 per cent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page,” he said. This means users no longer need to visit the original website. That has hit content creators hard. “If they were deriving value through selling subscriptions or putting up ads, or just the ego of knowing that someone is reading your stuff, that’s gone,” Prince said.

He also highlighted how AI tools make things worse. The ratio is far more unfair now. “So it was 2:1 10 years ago for Google. It’s 6:1 today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250:1. What do you think it is for Anthropic? 6,000:1,” he said. This means AI companies are using thousands of pages to create answers, but they don’t send users back to the websites that created that information in the first place.

Prince believes this model is broken. “The business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change,” he said, warning that if creators can’t make money, they’ll stop making content.

Cloudflare is in a unique position, he said, since it powers both AI companies and websites. “80 per cent of the AI companies use Cloudflare, similar —you know, 20 to 30 per cent of the web uses Cloudflare. And so we sit in the middle of that.”

Still, he says, not all hope is lost. “Is AI a fad, is it overhyped? I think the answer is probably yes and no. I would guess that 99 per cent of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1 per cent is going to be incredibly valuable”, he said.