Aramco, one of the world's leading energy companies, now owns 49% of HUMAIN, a young Saudi AI company. The two owners, Aramco and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), said on Sunday, Nov. 1, that the deal had closed. PIF keeps 51%. Aramco is getting its stake in return for key AI assets of its own and about 9.9 billion riyals ($2.6 billion) in cash for HUMAIN in 2026, according to the announcement.
HUMAIN, a PIF company launched in May 2025, is building every layer of AI, PIF and Aramco say: data centers, the online services that rent out their computing power, its own AI models and the software built on them. Its models include ALLaM, an Arabic-language AI of the kind behind chatbots such as ChatGPT, which PIF and Aramco call one of the world's most powerful Arabic-language AI models. HUMAIN plans to build AI data centers able to draw 3 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, to meet what the companies call growing demand for AI computing power in the region and around the world.
Aramco has said it sees AI as a source of rising demand for energy. When the deal was first announced in 2025, its chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, said the company was "well positioned to capture opportunities from rising energy demand linked to AI growth." Aramco expects to use HUMAIN's data centers and AI services to bring AI into its industrial work, and to earn more from AI and digital assets it already owns, the announcement says.
The deal closed just over a year after it was first announced. PIF and Aramco signed a non-binding outline in October 2025 that set out terms for Aramco to take "a significant minority stake" without naming a size, and that still needed a final agreement and regulators' approval. In July 2026 the European Commission approved the deal under EU merger rules, finding it raised no competition concerns because it would have little effect in the European Economic Area and the companies' combined position in the market is small.
Aramco has described what it handed over only in general terms, as key AI, computing and digital assets, along with capabilities and staff, without naming them or saying what they are worth, and neither company has put a value on HUMAIN after the deal.