Saudi Arabia’s AI “Third Pillar” Moment

The world wasn’t ready for this. In 2025, Saudi Arabia vaulted from oil powerhouse to the most audacious new force in global technology—a shift so sharp that Wall Street and Silicon Valley had to redraw their maps. The Future Investment Initiative (FII9) in Riyadh became the crucible of that pivot, blending sovereign ambition, institutional capital and global talent into a vision that has jolted the AI establishment.

Saudi Arabia’s spectacular emergence as the “third pillar” of global artificial intelligence in 2025 signals a new epoch in both technological development and diplomatic influence. From Riyadh’s oil-rich heart, FII9 turned into the gravitational centre where investment, vision and world-class leadership converged—reshaping not just the region’s trajectory, but the course of global AI itself.

Lighthouse ambitions: HUMAIN and the rise of AI infrastructure

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled Humain in May ahead of President Donald Trump’s state visit to Riyadh. At this week’s Future Investment Initiative, the project’s scale, ambition and deep pockets snapped into sharper focus.

No story better captures the shift than HUMAIN, the national AI champion backed by the Crown Prince and led by CEO Tareq Amin. Leveraging the Kingdom’s energy advantage and a near-$1 trillion sovereign fund, HUMAIN tabled a sweeping blueprint: world-scale data centres, advanced language models and sector-specific applications. The aim is unapologetically bold—make Saudi Arabia the world’s third-largest AI market, behind only the US and China—on the logic that abundant, reliable energy accelerates hyperscale build-outs, compresses timelines and unlocks the compute required for modern AI.

As Amin told FII, “We possess a unique advantage in Saudi Arabia. Take a look at our remarkable energy grid, which eliminates the need for a company like Humain to construct substations and generate power for data centers. This has allowed me to save 18 months of development time.”

HUMAIN plans up to six gigawatts of data-centre capacity by 2034 and has struck partnerships with Nvidia, AMD, AWS, Qualcomm and Cisco to anchor the build.

Across FII panels, the message was blunt: Saudi Arabia is deploying capital at unprecedented speed and scale. Landmark moves—from Aramco’s push into AI infrastructure to Google’s multibillion-dollar partnership to establish an AI hub—signal intent. At LEAP 2025 alone, more than $15 billion in tech and AI commitments were announced. Foreign direct investment into non-oil sectors is surging, and the hyperscalers are queuing up.

Voices from the vanguard: Schmidt, Fei-Fei and the “moonshot” crew

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, mapped the upside with trademark clarity: “Saudi in particular can become one of the big winners… If the country puts the money that’s in place now wisely and quickly.” For Schmidt, the convergence of capital, energy and focused government resolve puts Saudi on track to build some of the most advanced AI facilities in the world—provided execution matches ambition.

Dr Fei-Fei Li added nuance—and caution. While she championed the region’s capacity-building, ethics and governance were her refrain: “Without robust governance and broad collaboration, the AI abundance dividend could be lost to social fragmentation and security threats.” Her point: technical capability must be matched with responsible stewardship so benefits are broad and risks constrained.

Digital superintelligence is moving from theory to inevitability, poised to redraw the map of economic power, social systems, and national security. Research from International Data Corporation (IDC) projects that AI solutions and services will generate about US $22.3 trillion in economic impact worldwide by 2030, equivalent to roughly 3.7 percent of global GDP. What happens when digital superintelligence arrives — will it mark humanity’s greatest leap forward or become the most destabilizing force of our time?

Analysts from the “moonshot” camp placed the Gulf push in context: this isn’t branding—this is a genuine attempt to rewrite the rules for the next digital era, with Saudi spend flowing not only into infrastructure and chips but also into regional training hubs and model partnerships.

Diplomacy and the “third pillar” moment

Saudi Arabia’s bid stands out for its role as an emergent lighthouse for global AI diplomacy. FII became a crossroads for industry leaders, policymakers and governments eager to partner—or learn from—Riyadh’s model. Export rules were navigated to enable privileged access to next-gen American chips and architectures, while strict data-governance frameworks sought to cement trust with international partners. Saudi officials pressed a simple question to delegates from every continent: are you keeping pace with the new AI order?

The “third pillar” concept crystallised: Saudi Arabia is no longer a regional outlier, but a state shaping benchmarks for scaling infrastructure and ethical oversight. The agentic era was essentially inaugurated, with Saudi data centres and cloud platforms forming a backbone for actionable intelligence across medical science, engineering and climate modelling.

Real impact: agentic infrastructure and scientific gains

Saudi investment is translating to outcomes. More than 25% of Saudi enterprises now invest $50 million or more annually in AI initiatives—evidence of a decisive shift from pilots to scaled implementation. Rapid data-centre build-outs, coordinated talent pipelines and advanced chip-procurement agreements are fuelling next-gen breakthroughs: AI-powered diagnostics, population-health prediction, materials-science discovery, hyperlocal climate modelling and more resilient digital infrastructure.

Notably, 81% of Saudi businesses deploy industry-specific AI, and half expect significant ROI within two years. The face of Saudi AI is changing fast—hybrid “neoclouds”, sovereign platforms and globally respected benchmarks are entering the mainstream.

Why it matters: a multipolar AI race

Saudi Arabia’s “third pillar” status is not rhetoric—it marks a structural shift in global technology. For the first time in decades, the AI race isn’t a US–China bilateral; nations and industries now benchmark against a fast-rising Gulf standard. The Kingdom’s lighthouse is both warning and opportunity: laggards must pivot quickly; leaders can collaborate with a partner that is ethically minded and infrastructurally capable.

2025 will likely be remembered as the year the agentic era truly began—when global AI moved from theory to proliferation, and the Gulf’s bold leap set a fresh wave of digital transformation in motion. The next questions fall to the rest of the world: Who will keep up, adapt and help steer AI’s future? Where will breakthroughs—and equitable progress—occur? Increasingly, the answer is to look to Riyadh and the HUMAIN-powered Gulf.

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