Amazon partners in $5B joint investment in Saudi Arabia AI capabilities

Amazon is partnering with Humain to develop AI in Saudi Arabia.

Amazon is significantly increasing its commitment to helping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia develop its artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud subsidiary of Amazon and Humain, Saudi Arabia’s newly-created company dedicated to developing AI across the country and globally, have announced plans to invest more than $5 billion in a strategic partnership to build an “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia. 

This first-of-a-kind initiative will bring together multiple components, including dedicated AWS AI infrastructure and servers with semiconductors, AWS UltraCluster networks for faster AI training and inference, AWS AI services like SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as the Amazon Q generative AI assistant.

This partnership follows Amazon’s previous announcement it will launch an AWS infrastructure region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2026. As part of that long-term commitment, AWS plans to invest more than $5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia. 

[READ MORE: Amazon Web Services to expand in two new geographic areas]

The new AWS Region will consist of three availability zones at launch and AWS will continue to scale its training programs and help accelerate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goal of empowering women to increase participation in the workforce. 

“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, in a corporate blog post. “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.”