NVIDIA to ship 18,000 AI GPUs to Saudi Arabia's state-run AI data center after export restrictions are lifted
NVIDIA has announced that it will ship 18,000 AI GPUs to Saudi Arabia's state-owned AI company Humain, following President Donald Trump's reversal of former President Joe Biden's restrictions on the export of high-performance semiconductors.
HUMAIN and NVIDIA Announce Strategic Partnership to Build AI Factories of the Future in Saudi Arabia | NVIDIA Newsroom
Nvidia to Send Chips to Saudi's Humain for AI Data Centers - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-13/nvidia-to-send-chips-to-saudi-s-humain-for-ai-data-centers
Trump administration officially rescinds Biden's AI diffusion rules | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/trump-administration-officially-rescinds-bidens-ai-diffusion-rules/
US weights letting UAE buy over a million advanced Nvidia chips, Bloomberg News reports | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-weighs-letting-uae-buy-over-million-advanced-nvidia-chips-bloomberg-news-2025-05-13/
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced the partnership with Humain at the Saudi-American Investment Conference, part of President Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia.
'AI is an essential infrastructure for any country, just like electricity and the internet,' Huang said. 'AI requires a lot of power, and our energy-rich country will be able to unlock new capabilities in AI with NVIDIA technology.'
NVIDIA plans to ship hundreds of thousands of GPUs over the next five years, with the first phase being 18,000 NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell GPUs, which will be used in a new 500MW data center in Saudi Arabia.
With these investments, Humain will build data centers and AI infrastructure, as well as develop an Arabic version of the large-scale language model that will serve as the basis for generative AI. For AI 'inference,' Humain will partner with Groq , a US company that is a competitor of NVIDIA.
According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is requiring personal and financial data to be stored domestically, forcing foreign companies to set up facilities on the kingdom's soil to avoid contracts lapse.
On the same day, Amazon also announced a partnership with Humain and revealed plans to invest more than $5 billion to build dedicated AWS infrastructure and servers in Saudi Arabia. The company said it would build an 'AI Zone' in Saudi Arabia and plans to introduce multiple features, including the UltraCluster network to speed up AI training and inference, AWS services such as SageMaker and Bedrock, and AI application services such as Amazon Q.
All of these plans were announced shortly after President Trump declared the withdrawal of the AI diffusion rule. On May 13, 2025, the Commerce Department completely repealed the regulation that had been formulated during the Biden administration and was about to come into effect, which divided the world into three tiers and imposed export restrictions on semiconductors on all countries other than the first tier countries such as Japan and South Korea, thus easing export restrictions to Saudi Arabia. There are concerns that Biden's regulations will lead to Chinese technology spreading to other countries instead of American technology, and it is believed that the United States is actively working to promote AI in order to strengthen its own influence. However, exports to some countries such as China remain restricted, and other alternative measures are also planned to be taken. Bloomberg pointed out that 'the Commerce Department is likely to focus on direct negotiations with each country rather than comprehensive regulations in the future.'
President Trump is also scheduled to visit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after Saudi Arabia. According to a source, the Trump administration is arranging for NVIDIA to ship more than one million GPUs to the UAE, with one-fifth of the GPUs to be allocated to Abu Dhabi AI company G42 and the rest to American companies building data centers in the Gulf state. It is reported that OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT, may be one of the companies to receive the allocation.
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