(Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabian artificial intelligence company Humain has invested $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI, deepening ties between the world’s richest man and the kingdom as it pushes to become a global AI powerhouse.
The investment, announced Wednesday was part of xAI’s $20 billion funding round, which completed shortly before the startup’s acquisition by Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX. With the deal, Humain said it became a “significant minority shareholder” in xAI. Its holdings will convert into SpaceX shares — a roughly 0.24% ownership in the new, combined $1.25 trillion company, according to Bloomberg estimates.
The deal strengthens Musk’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has made AI a central plank of its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil. Humain was formed in 2025, with backing from the country’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund, Public Investment Fund, and has been on a dealmaking spree to build up the infrastructure and compute capacity required to train and run AI models.
The tie-up also supplies xAI, which operates the X social media platform and the Grok chatbot, with a ready customer. Grok trails OpenAI’s ChatGPT in adoption and xAI is still building out its commercial footprint, having focused on government contracts for its roll out.
xAI’s largest customers have been Musk’s own companies, including SpaceX and Tesla Inc. Starting in mid-2025, the startup announced contracts with the Pentagon and other entities in the US government. The company also said it had struck a deal with El Salvador to roll out Grok in the country’s educational system. Humain and xAI announced a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia last November, along with plans for Saudi Arabia to roll out xAI’s Grok models.
“Together, these initiatives deepen long-term alignment and extend Humain’s role from strategic partner to leading global shareholder in xAI,” Humain said in Wednesday’s statement.
Humain has previously invested in AI video-generation startup Luma AI and formed a joint venture with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. to build up data center capacity in Saudi Arabia.
Sovereign wealth funds in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates control more than $4 trillion, and many of these oil-rich countries have made AI central to their economic diversification. That’s made them key players in an industry poised to reshape many aspects of everyday life.
The Qatar Investment Authority invested in Anthropic in September, coming in as a “significant” investor in a $13 billion financing round that valued the company at $183 billion. Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi’s MGX was a co-lead investor in the AI firm’s latest round. That followed a run of high-profile bets from MGX, which is racing toward a target of more than $100 billion in assets under management.
