Saudi Arabia Invests $3B in Elon Musk’s xAI Empire

Money talks.
In AI, it also buys megawatts.

Humain says it has poured $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI, a move that spotlights how the AI race is shifting from splashy launches to buildout math: capital, compute, power, and the places you can actually build. It’s also a rare case where a state-backed AI push shows up as a direct stake in a US frontier lab.

Humain disclosed the investment on February 18, 2026, and said it was made during xAI’s $20 billion Series E round that closed in January 2026, according to Observer.

Why Humain is betting on xAI now

Saudi Arabia has been trying to turn “AI ambition” into hard assets: data centers, chips, and deployment agreements that make the country a place where frontier AI can run, not just a place that funds it.

Humain sits at the center of that strategy. According to the Financial Times, Humain is state-owned and backed by the Public Investment Fund, and it previously partnered with xAI to deploy Grok in Saudi Arabia and build more than 500 megawatts of new data center infrastructure. The same report said Humain’s xAI stake was converted into SpaceX shares after xAI’s merger with SpaceX.

That infrastructure-first approach also tracks with how Saudi Arabia became xAI’s data hub, where the bottleneck isn’t ideas, it’s electrons.

What xAI gets out of the deal

For xAI, the obvious win is runway. Frontier AI requires relentless spend: more compute, more specialized hardware, and more capacity to train and serve models at scale. Big checks can buy speed, especially when paired with build plans measured in megawatts.

The less obvious win is positioning. xAI has been evolving rapidly, with SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI reshaping how investors and competitors view Musk’s combined AI and space ecosystem. At the same time, org stability has become part of the story, with xAI founder departures adding to the churn narrative.

Put it together, and this deal reads like a signal flare: AI leadership is becoming an infrastructure game, and the countries that can finance and power compute clusters are trying to buy themselves a seat at the frontier.

Also read: AI now writes nearly all its code, is reshaping engineering workflows, hiring, and what “entry-level” looks like.

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