Mistral collaborates with Saudi PIF's HUMAIN to jointly build sovereign AI infrastructure

The French open-source weight AI laboratory Mistral and the AI company HUMAIN under the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced plans to build "sovereign AI" infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the broader region. According to a joint announcement from both parties, this collaboration is valued at "hundreds of millions of euros" and aims to meet the growing demand for sovereign AI, where data is not controlled by third-party companies, and models can be owned under open weights.

Both parties will jointly develop and localize advanced models and deploy AI solutions within Saudi Arabia and the broader region. Mistral is building its computing power layout through its end-to-end infrastructure division, Mistral Compute. This collaboration will allow it to run workloads on local computing power in Saudi Arabia, rather than relying solely on computing power from Europe and the United States. The two sides also plan to conduct joint marketing in regulated industries in Saudi Arabia. The first deliverables will cover cybersecurity and voice fields, involving inference, open models, and cutting-edge Arabic models in the region.

HUMAIN has accumulated over a year of construction. In November 2025, it expanded its cooperation with NVIDIA, planning to deploy up to 600,000 of NVIDIA's latest AI systems, including the GB300 platform, within three years; it also reached a data center agreement with xAI, relying on a facility with over 500 MW, and made an agreement with AWS to manage up to 150,000 GPUs in the Riyadh AI Zone. In the same month, HUMAIN, AMD, and Cisco established a joint venture aimed at building up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030.