According to Bloomberg, on 17 July, the artificial intelligence company XAI under Elon Musk is negotiating a lease of data centre capacity in Saudi Arabia. This is intended to expand its infrastructure to countries with low energy costs and strong policy support. XAI is currently in preliminary contact with two potential partners: Humain AI of Saudi background, which offered to provide thousands of MW (gigawattts)-grade data centre capacity for xAI; and another company, which is unnamed, which is building a smaller (200 MW) data centre facility that is expected to be operational in the short term.
Despite the ambitious proposals of Humain AI, its projects remain remote from the ground. The company, which is supported by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), has not yet begun to build most of its promised infrastructure. Any agreement with XAI would provide the mask with computing resources over the coming years, rather than immediate solutions. In either case, XAI would not own ownership of the facilities, but rather lease their capacity to run artificial intelligence models that require great computing power. Artificial intelligence companies such as xAI, OpenAI and Meta are actively seeking to build or lease large data centres to train and run models that support their chat robots, such as xAI ‘ s Grok. If Humain AI succeeds in developing a multigW level data centre, it is expected to be among the largest data centres in the world. Energy consumption at a gigawatt-class facility is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 900,000 households.
Within Humain AI, the technical team led by Jeff Thomas is responsible for infrastructure, while Saeed Al-Dabbas is responsible for commercial negotiations. This move coincides with the Mask strategy: he is looking for locations where XAI infrastructure can provide cheap energy and abundant capital. XAI has just recently completed a round of financing totalling $10 billion (approximately $72.7 billion RMB), including equity and debt financing. Mask said on his platform X that the company now has “sufficient capital”. XAI co-founder and former Tesla employee Ross Nordeen led the infrastructure negotiations and served as a transaction engineer and strategic officer in charge of site selection and size determination.
In addition to Saudi Arabia, the XAI team is also studying data centre trading opportunities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and has approached AI company G42, based in Abu Dhabi. At the same time, companies are looking at African countries with low-cost energy and lower operating costs. Saudi Arabia ‘ s strong sovereign capital and dedicated chip-processing capacity make it the most attractive option at present.
