YOU ARE AT:AI InfrastructureAWS, HUMAIN announce investment to boost AI in Saudi Arabia
AWS
Image courtesy of AWS

AWS, HUMAIN announce investment to boost AI in Saudi Arabia

Juan Pedro Tomás
By Juan Pedro Tomás
AI InfrastructureData CenterTelco Cloud

AWS and HUMAIN also plan to build a shared marketplace for AI software

In sum – what you need to know:

AWS and HUMAIN launch $5b AI push in Saudi Arabia – AWS and Saudi AI firm HUMAIN will invest over $5 billion to build a dedicated AI Zone featuring advanced infrastructure and cloud services.

New AI Zone to boost genAI, LLMs and public services – The partnership will support Arabic-language LLMs, as well as sectors like education and healthcare.

Training 100,000 Saudis in AI skills – As part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, the U.S firm will help train 100,000 people in cloud and AI.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and HUMAIN — a new Saudi company leading AI development in the country — have announced a major partnership to invest more than $5 billion in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The collaboration will help build a special “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia and drive AI adoption across the region and the world.

In a release, AWS noted that this new AI Zone will feature cutting-edge AWS infrastructure, including high-performance servers, advanced semiconductors and UltraCluster networking to speed up AI training and inference. It will also offer AWS services like SageMaker, Bedrock and Amazon Q, which help organizations build and run generative AI (genAI) applications.

This initiative builds on AWS’s previously announced $5.3 billion investment to launch a new AWS infrastructure region in Saudi Arabia by 2026. The AI Zone is aimed at expanding the use of advanced AI in Saudi Arabia and supporting the country’s Vision 2030 plan to become a global leader in technology.

Through this partnership, the U.S firm will bring its most powerful computing and AI tools to Saudi Arabia. These include services like Amazon SageMaker for building machine learning models, Amazon Bedrock for deploying genAI tools securely and Amazon Q — one of the world’s most advanced AI coding assistants.

HUMAIN will use AWS technology to create AI solutions for its clients. The two companies also plan to build a shared marketplace for AI software, making it easier for government agencies to find and use AI tools. Together, they will support the growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Arabic-focused versions, and help bring AI into all areas of Saudi life.

Key sectors such as government, health and education will benefit from this technology. AI tools could help personalize student learning, detect diseases earlier, and streamline government services, the U.S. company said. These goals will be supported by the firm’s Generative AI Innovation Center, which will work with HUMAIN to help startups, large businesses and government agencies build their AI capabilities.

“This new collaboration with HUMAIN lays the foundation for the intelligent era, accelerates our innovation momentum, grows our talent, and reinforces Saudi Arabia’s position as a global partner of choice in the age of AI,” said Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

The pair will also focus on growing Saudi Arabia’s startup scene by providing access to cloud tools, AI services and support programs like AWS Activate.

“This collaboration to build an AI Zone in Saudi Arabia will enable innovations across all industries using AWS’s advanced AI offerings, and reflects our commitment to support Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.

The U.S company is also expanding training programs to support Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation. In partnership with the Public Investment Fund (PIF), AWS will train 100,000 Saudis in cloud and AI skills, offering certifications such as AWS AI Practitioner and AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate.

Saudi Arabia is expected to be the biggest AI economy in the Middle East. A PwC report estimates AI will contribute $130 billion to the Kingdom’s economy by 2030 — more than 40% of the region’s total projected AI value.

Previous article
Bookmarks: Agentic AI — meet the new boss, same as the old boss
Next article
Charter to acquire Cox in $34.5 billion deal

ABOUT AUTHOR

Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro covers Global Carriers and Global Enterprise IoT. Prior to RCR, Juan Pedro worked for Business News Americas, covering telecoms and IT news in the Latin American markets. He also worked for Telecompaper as their Regional Editor for Latin America and Asia/Pacific. Juan Pedro has also contributed to Latin Trade magazine as the publication's correspondent in Argentina and with political risk consultancy firm Exclusive Analysis, writing reports and providing political and economic information from certain Latin American markets. He has a degree in International Relations and a master in Journalism and is married with two kids.

RELATED POSTS

ABOUT US

Since 1982, RCR Wireless News has been providing wireless and mobile industry news, insights, and analysis to mobile and wireless industry professionals, decision makers, policy makers, analysts and investors.

FOLLOW US

Google Cloud Next shows how network operators and vendors are using AI for telecom

We already know that businesses are pushing hard to figure out how artificial intelligence can benefit them. In telecom specifically, an Nvidia survey earlier this year found that 37% of respondents said their companies were investing in AI for telecom to improve network planning and operations, and 33% said that there had already been investments in AI for telecom field operations.

At this week’s Google Cloud Next event, some of Google Cloud’s specific work on advancing the use of AI for telecom is being highlighted, as well as AI for enterprises in other verticals. Here are three perspectives on how companies are leveraging Google Cloud AI for telecom.

–Verizon has integrated Google Cloud’s generative AI into customer operations, which the two companies said has led to “95% comprehensive answerability for customer inquiries” and “demonstrably more efficient and effective customer care interactions.” Verizon is making use of a Google Cloud conversational AI agent that leverages Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, Gemini models and Agent Assist Panel in order to give its customer service reps “real-time, context-aware, and personalized answers” to customer questions, as opposed to the reps having to do manual searches of knowledge bases.

Verizon has deployed this across 28,000 customer care reps and retail stores. Additional features like automated summaries of conversations, and automated follow-up action reminders, are also in the process of being rolled out. Those internal AI agents are in addition to several genAI tools that are directly customer-facing and use Google’s Gemini models for virtual assistants which use natural language.

Background image: Verizon

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud and the integration of Gemini into our customer care platforms mark a significant advancement in our commitment to providing exceptional customer experiences,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, CEO of Verizon Consumer. “The tangible results demonstrate the power of AI to enhance efficiency and empower our customer care teams.”

“The impact of Gemini on Verizon’s customer service operations is a testament to our deep partnership and Verizon’s commitment to continued innovation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “These results demonstrate the potential of AI to not just improve operations, but to create more meaningful and helpful interactions for customers everywhere, ultimately driving significant value for businesses.”

-“We’re really trying hard to build an autonomous network which is going to be obviously driven by AI more and more over time,” said David Sauvageau, director of software development, data and AI for Bell Canada, in a briefing call prior to Google Cloud Next.

In general, he continued, the network operator see AI as a “fundamental building block for the future of telecom, for innovation, for customer operations and for network operations.”

He said in the short-term, Bell Canada is prioritizing AI applications for telecom which “really focus on optimizing our customer experience and network ops.” For the latter in particular, Sauvageau said, “Our goal is really to leverage all the data that we have available in AI in order to predict and prevent issues before they actually impact our customers. So, really moving from reactive to preventive customer experience.”

Additionally, Sauvageau said, that Bell Canada believes AI is crucial for managing the increased complexity of telecom networks. “We need to be much more efficient, [and have] have faster innovations in areas like edge computing, digital twin, 6G or any other future network technologies. And ultimately … our goal is to build and accelerate the development of our AI-powered autonomous networks.”

-Razvan Teslaru, VP and head of strategy and portfolio for cloud software and services at Ericsson, said that the use of AI for telecom encompasses both increased efficiency and increased monetization—the latter being magic words for the telecom industry right now.

Autonomy is both about enabling differentiated connectivity at scale, he said, and monetization of that differentiated connectivity. At this year’s Mobile World Congress Barcelona, one of the things Ericsson spotlights was how it integrates its service orchestration with Google Cloud and its Vertex AI, Teslaru noted.

It’s now possible, he said, for a user to express their intent in natural language: A request to configure a specific type of connectivity to, say, a hospital, over a dedicated slice. “You can have Gemini interpret that intent and break it into service orders. … Then AI agents can take over these service orders and take them into execution, and also observe the results, so we can take corrective action autonomously,” he said.

So ultimately, then, network autonomy is about delivering personalized (or differentiated) connectivity with efficiency, while also doing so at a scale that means more effective and large-scale monetization.

Google Cloud emphasizes AI agents for telecom

Erwan Menard, director (outbound) of product management for cloud AI at Google Cloud, said that “When we look ahead, we envision networks that can largely manage themselves through the use of intelligent software agents.” He continued: “Think of these agents as digital experts that can automatically handle tasks like network configuration, problem solving and resource allocation.This would free up telcos from any routine operational burden, allowing human experts to focus on innovation and new services, ultimately leading to greater efficiency and productivity in network operations.”

In particular, he emphasized, telecoms face the unique challenge of having a “mission-critical duty to maintain knowledge over technologies which could be in service for decades. So the notion of being able to tap accurately through the knowledge of the company to help onboard a new resource or to assist somebody who has a decision to make—technical or business—is quite an important challenge in the telecom industry.” Google Cloud’s Google Agentspace was designed for such knowledge-heavy industries, Menard continued, to retrieve information across multiple systems with the idea of using “agentic workflows to be able to invest a new way of work.”

This week, the company is spotlighting its a new Agent Gallery, so that employees across the telecom organization can get personalized suggestions on which AI agents would be useful to them—either out-of-the-box from Google Cloud, agents built by the company or third-party AI agents. Google Cloud is also offering the ability to design and build agents with a no-code interface, in which people can essentially walk through a series of steps and “convert that sequence into an agent that then becomes your personalized assistant,” Menard explained.

 

© 2025 RCR Wireless News
Powered by Eight Hats