San Francisco-based Together AI announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s state-backed AI firm Humain to build a 250 megawatt data center in the kingdom.
Together AI told the New York Times the arrangement could generate about $5 billion annually, and the startup’s co-founder and CEO Vipul Prakash said the move responds to a growing backlash from American communities over data-centre projects.
That commercial signal sits against a wider U.S. resistance to large AI data centres that has delayed and blocked many projects and helped push firms to seek large, fast-permitting sites and abundant power abroad.
Saudi Arabia has been rapidly expanding capacity through Humain and related builds, aiming to bring early phases online within months and to scale capacity far beyond the single site, and Together AI, valued at roughly $8.3 billion in July, expects the deal to secure power and chip supply for its model training needs.
Together AI’s shift underlines how community opposition, local permitting and grid constraints are changing where AI compute is sited, and how companies are weighing geopolitical and operational trade-offs as they grow capacity.
