AMD, Cisco, and Humain plan to build an AI joint venture and have won their first major customer

AMD, Cisco and Humain, an AI start-up in Saudi Arabia (referred to as Saudi Arabia), are forming a joint venture to build data centers in the Middle East and have now secured their first customer.

According to three company CEOs in an exclusive interview with Reuters, the joint venture will launch a 100-megawatt data center project in Saudi Arabia. Humain has signed a contract with generative video startup Luma AI to provide its computing power, and Luma has signed up to purchase all 100 megawatts of capacity, CEO Tareq Amin said.

More cooperation is expected as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with U.S. President Trump this week. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has invested in Humain to support its plans to build large-scale data centers across the country, where land is abundant and electricity is cheap.

AMD announced in May a $10 billion cooperation with Humain, which includes the purchase of AMD’s advanced AI chips. AMD and Cisco are both minority shareholders in the joint venture and will share profits and losses. Humain will take the lead, AMD CEO Lisa Su said, "We will be jointly responsible for ensuring the success of this project."

Amin said that the target market of this joint venture covers Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East and Africa, with an overall market size of approximately 4.5 billion people. The plan foresees the construction of up to 1 gigawatt of new data centers by 2030.

In the first 100 MW build, Cisco will provide network equipment and other infrastructure, while AMD will supply MI450 AI chips. Construction of the first phase is expected to begin in 2026 and will be entirely powered by renewable energy. Humain is also currently receiving purchase orders for some subsequent builds.

In addition to providing infrastructure equipment, Cisco will also use its business team to help sell data center computing capacity that has not yet been built. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the company has 25 years of experience designing incentive programs for sales teams and will use that experience to help Humain sell data center capacity.

At the same time, Adobe and Qualcomm also stated that they will cooperate with Humain to develop content creation tools for generating Arabic content and targeting the Middle East. Humain also expects to deploy 200 MW of Qualcomm AI200 and AI250 rack solutions starting in 2026.

As for NVIDIA, xAI stated that a large data center being built in Saudi Arabia will be equipped with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA chips, and xAI will be the first customer. Among them, NVIDIA will provide Humain with chips equivalent to 500 megawatts of electricity. Humain also further stated that approximately 600,000 NVIDIA GPUs will be deployed.

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