Blackstone & Humain: The US$3bn Funding for AI Data Centres

The push to build data centre capacity has become one of the defining infrastructure battles of the AI era. 

As AI companies vie for computing power, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are stepping in with the kind of capital a sector needs when billions of dollars must be spent before a single server goes live.

Blackstone, the private equity firm, is now partnering with Humain, Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI company, in a US$3bn deal to construct data centres across the kingdom. 

AirTrunk, the data centre operator owned by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will work with Humain to finance, develop and operate facilities that house the computer systems and storage equipment required to run AI models.

The companies announce the agreement on Tuesday at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, where global investors and business leaders have gathered for the kingdom’s annual showcase.

Why the partnership is expected to expand beyond initial investment

Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain says that the effort will likely grow and may eventually include other firms such as BlackRock, KKR and DigitalBridge Group. 

BlackRock is an asset management company, whilst KKR and DigitalBridge are investment firms that focus on infrastructure assets.

Blackstone has spent years building a data centre empire now valued at roughly US$25bn.

Last year alone, the firm paid about US$16bn for AirTrunk, which operates facilities across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Malaysia. 

These sites provide the infrastructure and industrial-scale cooling systems needed to prevent thousands of servers from overheating during continuous operation.

Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone, speaks at a panel at the conference on Tuesday and picks out AI and data centres as particularly interesting areas for investment. 

But he sounds a warning that electricity to power them could be in “short supply”.

Humain was set up by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, just five months ago in May. 

PIF and Aramco, the state oil company, have also announced a non-binding term sheet for Aramco to buy a “significant minority stake” in the AI company.

Humain: Targeting third place in global AI infrastructure

Humain has already broken ground on its first data centres in Saudi Arabia and expects them to be up and running early next year. 

The company is in the process of procuring semiconductors from US chipmakers, including Nvidia, which makes the graphics processing units that have become essential for training and running AI models. 

Tareq plans to add 1.9 gigawatts of data centre capacity by 2030.

The companies remain tight-lipped about where exactly the data centre campus will be located, how much capacity it will have, or which chips they plan to use. 

Earlier this year, the Trump administration approved a plan to ship advanced semiconductors from Nvidia and AMD to the Gulf region, but it remains unclear if the firms actually got those approvals.

Humain has already lined up Qualcomm, the mobile chip company and Cisco Systems, the networking equipment manufacturer, as partners. 

The company is also in early talks with Elon Musk’s xAI on a data centre deal in Saudi Arabia. Humain Ventures, a US$10bn fund that launched this summer, has started deploying capital.

Tareq lays out his ambition for Saudi Arabia to be “the third-largest AI infrastructure provider, behind the US and China”. 

The partnership, he says in the statement, marks “a pivotal moment in creating scalable, secure – and sustainable data center capacity to support the rapid growth of AI and cloud computing”.