Private equity powerhouse Blackstone Inc is teaming up with Saudi Arabia’s emerging artificial intelligence firm Humain to develop data centres across the kingdom, beginning with an initial investment of about US$3 billion (RM12.6 billion).
AirTrunk, a hyperscale data centre operator owned by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will collaborate with Humain to establish a long-term partnership focused on financing, developing, and managing AI infrastructure throughout Saudi Arabia, the firms said in a joint statement on Tuesday (Oct 28).
Announced on the sidelines of Riyadh’s Future Investment Initiative (FII), the deal underscores Saudi Arabia’s accelerating push into AI and digital infrastructure. Both Blackstone and BlackRock Inc have reportedly been competing to invest billions in Humain, Bloomberg News previously reported.
The collaboration adds to a wave of global investments pouring into AI-related infrastructure, as leading investors and tech firms race to build capacity to support generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Blackstone, which has built a global data centre empire, acquired AirTrunk for around US$16 billion last year. The company currently operates facilities across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Malaysia.
At the FII conference, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman described AI and data centres as key investment frontiers, though he cautioned that energy supply remains a pressing challenge for the industry.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), established Humain in May to spearhead the kingdom’s AI ambitions. The company recently broke ground on its first data centres, which are expected to go live early next year, and plans to add 1.9GW of capacity by 2030.
Humain is also securing advanced semiconductors from US suppliers, including Nvidia Corp, and counts Qualcomm Inc and Cisco Systems Inc among its partners. It is reportedly in early talks with Elon Musk’s xAI on a potential Saudi data centre collaboration.
The company’s US$10 billion Humain Ventures fund, launched earlier this year, has begun deploying capital into AI infrastructure projects.
Humain CEO Tareq Amin said the partnership with Blackstone marks a major milestone in the kingdom’s AI journey.
“This collaboration represents a pivotal moment in building scalable, secure, and sustainable data centre capacity to support the explosive growth of AI and cloud computing,” Amin said, adding that the company aims to make Saudi Arabia the world’s third-largest AI infrastructure hub, after the US and China.
