Saudi Arabia’s Humain Backs Elon Musk’s AI Ambitions With $3 Billion xAI Stake

Humain, a Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) company focused on artificial intelligence (AI), said Wednesday (Feb. 18) that it invested $3 billion in xAI’s Series E funding round just before xAI was acquired by SpaceX.

With its xAI holdings converted into SpaceX shares, Humain became a significant minority shareholder and positioned itself at a pivotal moment in the firm’s expansion and integration, Humain said in a Wednesday (Feb. 18) press release.

“This investment reflects Humain’s conviction in transformational AI and our ability to deploy meaningful capital behind exceptional opportunities where long-term vision, technical excellence, and execution converge,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said in the release. “xAI’s trajectory, further strengthened by its acquisition by SpaceX, one of the largest technology mergers on record, represents the kind of high-impact platform we seek to support with significant capital.”

Humain’s investment in xAI followed the November announcement that the two companies partnered to design, build and operate data centers and deploy xAI’s Grok models across Saudi Arabia.

“Together with xAI, we are creating scale that few others can match and speed that redefines what is possible, and compute that will shape the world’s most advanced technologies,” Amin said in a November press release.

Humain debuted in May, saying that it was beginning one of the largest planned AI infrastructure builds globally and that it aims to become the AI leader in the Middle East.

The Saudi state-backed company aims to handle 7% of the world’s AI training and inferencing workloads by 2030, according to that report.

PYMNTS reported in June that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are locked in a high-stakes race to be the main AI tech hub in the Middle East. Both countries are spending veritable fortunes for their ambitions, forming strategic alliances with U.S. tech giants and planning to build some of the world’s largest data center clusters.

SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI was announced Feb. 2 by Elon Musk, the owner of the two companies. Musk said the combination will enable solar-powered, space-based AI, in part by using designs and strategies developed around SpaceX’s existing broadband satellite systems.