Elon Musk’s xAI Is Getting a Fancy 500-Megawatt Knowledge Heart in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia seems to be absolutely engaged in a MAGA-washing marketing campaign, buddying as much as the Trump administration and its hangers-on to enhance its picture for billionaires to do enterprise there. It seems to be working. At a US-Saudi funding discussion board hosted on Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, will construct a 500-megawatt knowledge middle in Saudi Arabia.

The build-out—which would be the largest knowledge middle exterior of the US, according to The New York Times—will likely be a part of a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned AI startup Humain and can faucet Nvidia to offer the chips that can energy the mission. Additionally it is half of a bigger bundle of offers between US companies and Saudi Arabia, which incorporates Trump’s resolution to sell F-35s to the country regardless of issues from the Pentagon.

The partnership between Musk and Saudi Arabia is smart on a number of ranges. Regardless of their fallout that noticed Musk declare Trump is in the Epstein files, he stays probably the most high-profile MAGA-aligned exec on the market. The 2 aren’t unfamiliar with one another, as Saudi Arabia’s funding arm, Kingdom Holding Firm, was one of the biggest financers of Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

They’re additionally pure companions primarily based on their needs. Musk desires to quickly develop xAI’s infrastructure, regulations be damned, and wishes a spot that can let him rapidly scale so he can energy Grok, the chatbot greatest identified for turning into MechaHitler. He’s already constructed a controversial 300-megawatt data center in Memphis, however this mission can be the biggest cluster to this point for xAI.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia badly desires to bring in tech money to diversify its sources of wealth past oil, and it has numerous land, energy, and fiber optic wires that it is able to deploy. Humain, the state’s AI mission, aims to power six percent of all AI processing within the coming years. This knowledge middle can be a big transfer towards that purpose.

The info middle does nonetheless face some obstacles, together with the truth that Saudi Arabia can’t presently buy the newest and biggest chips from Nvidia as a result of export controls put in place by the Trump administration. However don’t fear, Trump appears more than happy to lift those restrictions in order that Humain can meet its purpose of deploying 400,000 AI chips by 2030. Tareq Amin, the top of Saudi Arabia’s synthetic intelligence startup Humain, has been courting favor with the Trump administration for precisely this cause, together with promising not to do business with Chinese firms like Huawei.

In case there was any doubt, it seems you’ll be able to nonetheless grease the wheels of dealmaking with the Trump administration with flattery and favoritism.