Aramco bets on AI with 49% stake in HUMAIN

Saudi Aramco acquired a 49% stake in the state-backed HUMAIN in a deal in which it paid about 9.9 billion riyals, equivalent to 2.6 billion dollars, in addition to prominent technology assets, while the Public Investment Fund retained a 51% stake.

HUMAIN owns data center infrastructure and cloud platforms, and develops artificial intelligence models including the Arabic language model ALLaM. The company plans to reach about 3 gigawatts of AI-dedicated data center capacity by 2030.

Separately, Aramco announced adjusted net income of 31.2 billion dollars in the third quarter, compared with about 28.6 billion dollars in the same period last year.

The deal gives Aramco a stake in a company that combines data centers, cloud platforms and language models, and the Public Investment Fund remains the largest shareholder. Large AI models need massive data centers and high electrical power, which makes infrastructure an essential part of competition in the sector.

What do these terms mean?

Minority stake: A share of a company's stock of less than half, giving its holder a share of profits and some decisions without full control.

Data centers: Facilities containing thousands of computers and servers that run digital models and services and consume large amounts of electricity.

Large language model (LLM): An artificial intelligence program that learns from huge amounts of text and generates text and answers questions.

Gigawatt: A unit for measuring electrical power equal to one billion watts, used to describe the consumption of large data centers.

Adjusted net income: A profit measure that excludes some non-recurring items to show the company's operating performance more clearly.