Saudi Arabia invests heavily in AI: NVIDIA and AMD secure billions in orders, Lenovo quietly profits

According to Zhitong Finance APP, on May 13, NVIDIA, AMD, and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) subsidiary artificial intelligence company Humain reached a cooperation agreement worth a total of $15 billion. According to the cooperation details, NVIDIA will build 500 megawatts of AI infrastructure for Saudi Arabia over the next five years, with the first deployment of 18,000 nodes of the GB300 Grace Blackwell high-performance computing cluster; AMD will provide $10 billion worth of chip and software support for the "Transatlantic AI Corridor" project led by Humain, which will establish 12 supercomputing center nodes between Saudi Arabia and the United States, forming a global computing power network.

However, before the American tech giants signed multi-billion dollar orders in the Middle East, a Chinese company had already begun to lay out its strategy in this computing power competition.

Saudi Arabia's AI Strategy Executor: Humain + Alat

This competition among chip giants is essentially a manifestation of Saudi Arabia's "Vision 2030" strategy. As the world's largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia is pushing for economic transformation with an annual investment of $30 billion, and AI is seen as the key to breaking through.

The execution of this strategy is reportedly led personally by the Saudi Crown Prince. The main player in this transaction—Humain—has its chairman as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself.

The company is operated by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF). As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), Humain is tasked with the mission of building a 1.9 gigawatt data center by 2030—this scale is equivalent to 1.5 times the total capacity of the current top global cloud service provider AWS's available zones.

In fact, PIF has already supported several artificial intelligence companies, including another company chaired by Prince Mohammed, Alat, which plans to invest $100 billion in AI hardware and infrastructure by 2030.

In this restructuring of technological power, Lenovo Group (00992) has clearly made its move much earlier. In May 2024, Lenovo reached a $2 billion strategic cooperation agreement with Alat, a subsidiary of PIF, to build a sustainable manufacturing base in Saudi Arabia and establish a headquarters for the Middle East and Africa region. This manufacturing base will rely on local R&D teams to create end-to-end "Made in Saudi" products, with an expected annual production of millions of personal computers and servers. This deep binding of the "national team" with international tech giants demonstrates Saudi Arabia's comprehensive layout in the AI industry chain from hardware to software, from infrastructure to application ecology.

PIF, as a sovereign fund managing $940 billion in assets, forms a closed loop of "technology R&D - manufacturing implementation" through its holdings in Humain and Alat.

Humain undertakes the dual mission of developing Arabic large models and building a computing power network. In addition to its cooperation with NVIDIA and AMD, Humain plans to launch a 100 billion parameter Arabic large model ALLaM by 2026, covering Islamic cultural classics and oil industry knowledge bases, breaking the monopoly of English in the field of AI content generation Alat is solidifying the foundation of localized computing infrastructure through manufacturing. The $2 billion cooperation agreement reached with Lenovo will establish a 200,000 square meter production base in the Saudi Integrated Logistics Zone (SILZ), producing millions of servers annually to directly serve Humain's data center needs. This "capital - technology - manufacturing" vertical integration enables Saudi Arabia to build a zero-carbon computing network at the world's lowest renewable energy cost (approximately $0.015 per kilowatt-hour).

Lenovo Breaks Ground in the Middle East: From Capital Cooperation to Localized Deepening

In May 2024, the $2 billion interest-free convertible bond investment reached between Lenovo Group and Alat became a key move for deepening its presence in the Middle Eastern market. This funding not only provides Lenovo with an annual interest saving of approximately $110 million but also accelerates market penetration through the endorsement of sovereign funds.

Currently, Lenovo's headquarters for the Middle East and Africa in Riyadh is under construction, including a customer service center and R&D center, and a 200,000 square meter production base is being built in the Saudi Integrated Logistics Zone (SILZ), expected to be operational by 2026, producing millions of "Saudi-made" PCs and servers annually.

For Lenovo, the establishment of the new factory has multiple strategic significances:

• First, enhanced supply chain resilience: Lenovo's global manufacturing network expands to Saudi Arabia, forming a distributed layout covering over 30 countries including China, Mexico, and India, allowing for flexible responses to geopolitical risks;

• Second, cost optimization: Saudi Arabia has the lowest renewable energy costs globally, and combined with localized production, it can reduce logistics and energy expenses, enhancing product competitiveness;

• Third, policy dividends: Saudi Arabia's "Vision 2030" requires government projects to prioritize the procurement of locally manufactured products, allowing Lenovo to deeply participate in national-level IT construction projects such as NEOM and the Red Sea project.

With the announcement of collaborations between NVIDIA, AMD, and Saudi Arabia, the implementation of Saudi Arabia's AI strategy will accelerate significantly. A larger business opportunity is already emerging: the Saudi computing center and computing network, where Lenovo seems to be the most suitable and competitive participant.

• First, timing. Lenovo's Saudi factory is set to officially commence production in 2026, coinciding with the expected launch of the Saudi computing center and computing network;

• Second, location advantage. The Saudi factory is located in the capital, Riyadh, allowing Lenovo, as the world's third-largest server supplier, to achieve local delivery, a capability that no competitor possesses;

• Third, human connections. Lenovo has always been an important partner of NVIDIA and AMD, while also being a strategic partner of Alat, the executor of Saudi Arabia's AI strategy. Such strong "human connections" will undoubtedly make it one of the key participants in this major project From this, we can easily see that as Saudi Arabia's AI infrastructure construction enters an accelerated phase, Lenovo, with its "localization of manufacturing + ecological technology + diversified capital" triple strategy, is expected to achieve a stunning transformation from a hardware supplier to a strategic partner in the AI battlefield of Saudi Arabia. Its successful experience in the Middle East market is also a reflection of the "new globalization" based on the local delivery of global resources, and this model of "rooted locally, radiating globally" will provide a replicable template for Chinese technology companies going abroad.

Moreover, Lenovo's deep collaboration with international giants such as AMD and NVIDIA also indicates that Saudi Arabia's AI strategy will become a key battlefield for the reconstruction of the global technology industry chain