Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup plans to develop a 500 megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia with the kingdom’s state-backed AI venture Humain that will rely on chips from Nvidia Corp.
Musk announced the plans on Wednesday alongside Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington. The two men spoke ahead of addresses at the event from US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Musk has plowed resources into xAI, his latest venture, after a bitter falling out with OpenAI, which he helped form. Musk’s firm, which makes the chatbot Grok, has since been in a race against OpenAI and Anthropic to develop AI models and raise investor cash.
Bloomberg previously reported that Saudi’s Humain was in talks with xAI about providing several gigawatts of computing resources to the startup. On stage on Wednesday, Musk tripped over the announcement, joking that the deal was for 500 gigawatts, rather than the actual amount.
While Humain has said it is working with Nvidia and other chip providers, Saudi Arabia still does not have US approvals to buy the most advanced semiconductors. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration plans to approve chip sales to Humain soon.