Aramco now owns 49% of HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s state AI company, after closing the deal with $2.6bn (SAR 9.9bn) in cash. PIF, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, keeps the other 51%.
Aramco, the Saudi state oil giant, is also handing over its own AI, compute, and digital assets, and it plans to run AI across its industrial operations on HUMAIN’s infrastructure. That puts the kingdom’s oil company and its sovereign wealth fund behind one AI business, with a target of 3 gigawatts of AI data centre capacity by 2030.
On 1 November, PIF and Aramco said the transaction had closed. Aramco bought the stake through a wholly owned subsidiary, and according to Pulse 2.0, it’ll pay the cash (about AED 9.7bn) during 2026. The two will jointly oversee HUMAIN’s growth across data centres, high-performance computing, cloud platforms, AI models, apps, and industry solutions.
This partnership with PIF strengthens Aramco’s position as a global technology leader and AI powerhouse, while laying the foundation for localizing the AI industry and enabling faster, more integrated, and scalable deployment of AI systems.
Amin H. Nasser, President and CEO of Aramco
Aramco says it will also monetise its existing digital and AI assets. It has generated $11.3bn (about AED 41.5bn) in “Technology Realized Value” since 2023, much of it from AI solutions. For PIF, the deal fits its 2026-2030 strategy of tying sectors together and building Saudi firms that compete internationally.
In October 2025, PIF and Aramco announced a non-binding term sheet that gave neither the size nor the value of the stake. PIF launched HUMAIN in May 2025 to cover data centres, cloud platforms, advanced AI models, and AI solutions, including ALLaM, a multimodal Arabic large language model. Its projects now include the Horizon Pro agentic platform and a planned 50MW AI Zone with AWS. PIF also led the consortium that closed its $55bn takeover of EA.
HUMAIN is tendering a 100MW AI data centre in Riyadh, a contract MEED puts at about $1bn (AED 3.67bn), and bids are due on 8 November.
