Together AI has partnered with Saudi Arabian AI provider HUMAIN to build a 250-megawatt data center, giving the American AI startup access to more computing capacity as community resistance challenges data center expansion in the U.S.

The Saudi facility is expected to provide Together AI with 120,000 semiconductors and could generate more than $5 billion in annual revenue. HUMAIN plans to deliver an initial 7,000 chips by November, with Together AI’s full allocation scheduled for 2027.

For Together AI, the deal addresses a pressing issue confronting the AI buildout: finding enough computing hardware and the other needed resources to support quickly expanding workloads. Together AI CEO Vipul Prakash has acknowledged the difficulties facing US domestic data center expansion due to local resistance and moratoriums.

Based in San Francisco and founded in 2022, Together AI provides cloud infrastructure for open-source AI models, including inference and training. The company serves more than one million developers and was valued at $8.3 billion in July.

Demand for its services has grown as open-source models have narrowed the performance gap with proprietary AI platforms. Enterprises can use open models to retain greater control over corporate data and AI applications, creating a growing market for the infrastructure needed to run them.

Saudi Arabia Infrastructure Expansion

The HUMAIN project will roughly triple Together AI’s existing data center capacity. Under the agreement, Together AI will use HUMAIN’s chips and provide the Saudi company with a portion of the resulting revenue.

Saudi Arabia brings large amounts of available power to the partnership. The country is building AI infrastructure as part of an overall effort to develop industries beyond oil, with HUMAIN playing a key role in that strategy.

HUMAIN was launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and is backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. The company is building data center sites in Riyadh and Dammam and expects its facilities to reach a combined 250 megawatts of capacity by early 2027.

Its longer-term target is far larger. HUMAIN plans to develop six gigawatts of data center power by 2034 in a project estimated to cost $77 billion. To put that growth plan in perspective, total Middle Eastern data center capacity stood at approximately 400 megawatts at the end of last year.

That planned buildout is attracting major tech vendors. HUMAIN has announced deals with AWS, xAI and Luma AI, along with chip agreements involving NVIDIA, AMD and Qualcomm. U.S. approval has enabled HUMAIN to begin importing an initial 35,000 American semiconductors.

Saudi Arabia also offers a geographic advantage for cloud services, with the potential for low-latency connections to customers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Longer term, the deal suggests that the enormous amounts of electricity and chips required for AI, and the complications of U.S.-based infrastructure, will prompt tech companies to seek more international locations for data centers.