Saudi Arabia appears to be fully engaged in a MAGA-washing campaign, buddying up to the Trump administration and its hangers-on to improve its image for billionaires to do business there. It appears to be working. At a US-Saudi investment forum hosted on Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, will build a 500-megawatt data center in Saudi Arabia.
The build-out—which will be the largest data center outside of the US, according to The New York Times—will be part of a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned AI startup Humain and will tap Nvidia to provide the chips that will power the project. It is also part of a larger package of deals between US firms and Saudi Arabia, which includes Trump’s decision to sell F-35s to the country despite concerns from the Pentagon.
The partnership between Musk and Saudi Arabia makes sense on several levels. Despite their fallout that saw Musk claim Trump is in the Epstein files, he remains the most high-profile MAGA-aligned exec out there. The two aren’t unfamiliar with each other, as Saudi Arabia’s investment arm, Kingdom Holding Company, was one of the biggest financers of Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
They’re also natural partners based on their desires. Musk wants to rapidly expand xAI’s infrastructure, regulations be damned, and needs a place that will let him quickly scale so he can power Grok, the chatbot best known for turning into MechaHitler. He’s already built a controversial 300-megawatt data center in Memphis, but this project would be the largest cluster to date for xAI.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia badly wants to bring in tech money to diversify its sources of wealth beyond oil, and it has lots of land, power, and fiber optic cables that it is ready to deploy. Humain, the state’s AI project, aims to power six percent of all AI processing in the coming years. This data center would be a significant move toward that goal.
The data center does still face some obstacles, including the fact that Saudi Arabia can’t currently purchase the latest and greatest chips from Nvidia due to export controls put in place by the Trump administration. But don’t worry, Trump seems more than happy to lift those restrictions so that Humain can meet its goal of deploying 400,000 AI chips by 2030. Tareq Amin, the head of Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence startup Humain, has been courting favor with the Trump administration for exactly this reason, including promising not to do business with Chinese firms like Huawei.
In case there was any doubt, it appears you can still grease the wheels of dealmaking with the Trump administration with flattery and favoritism.
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