With the backlash against data centers in the U.S. rising, some AI companies are looking to site their compute power far away.
U.S.-based start-up Together AI has partnered with the Saudi Arabian artificial intelligence company Humain for 250 megawatts of electricity and 120,000 semiconductors from a Saudi-based data center. The New York Times reports that Together AI, which serves open-source artificial intelligence models to customers, will use Humain’s chips and offer a share of its revenue in exchange. Together AI, valued at $8.3 billion in July, said it expected business from the data center to bring in $5 billion annually.
“Open source is quickly becoming the default way companies build with AI, because they want ownership – of their models, their data, and their intelligence," said Vipul Ved Prakash, Co-Founder and CEO of Together AI, in a statement released August 31. “We’re thrilled to partner with HUMAIN to unlock tremendous new capacity our customers need. This collaboration brings together what we each do best: HUMAIN’s expertise in large-scale infrastructure and capital deployment, and Together’s best-in-class AI cloud and technical talent.”
“More and more, local communities don’t want data centers in their backyards, and there are a lot of cancellations and moratoriums, so U.S. capacity is becoming even more constrained,” said Vipul Prakash, a co-founder and the chief executive of Together AI.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman started Humain last year as part of the kingdom’s effort to jump-start its A.I. industry and diversify its economy away from oil. The company is luring away American companies hungry for data-processing capacity to handle the rise in demand for AI, but facing a surge of community pushbacks on data centers being built in the U.S.
Humain has announced A.I. data center partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Luma AI and Elon Musk’s xAI (now a part of SpaceX), among others. It has also announced partnerships to purchase chips from the American companies Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm. Those deals were made possible after the United States cleared the way for Humain to import an initial batch of 35,000 U.S. semiconductors.
Humain is currently building two massive data centers, in Riyadh and Dammam. The Times says the company expects to deploy a total of 250 megawatts of power to its data centers by the start of 2027, and has a goal of supplying six gigawatts of power by 2034, at a total cost of $77 billion.
