French open-weight AI lab Mistral and HUMAIN, the AI company backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, said they will build sovereign AI infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the wider region. According to ChainCatcher, the partnership is valued at several hundred million euros and is aimed at meeting rising demand for sovereign AI, where data is not controlled by third-party companies and models can be owned under open weights.

The two companies will jointly develop and localize advanced models and deploy AI solutions in Saudi Arabia and beyond. Mistral said the deal will allow workloads to run on local Saudi compute through its Mistral Compute infrastructure unit rather than relying only on capacity in Europe and the U.S. The companies also plan joint go-to-market efforts in Saudi Arabia for regulated industries, with initial deliveries covering cybersecurity and voice applications, as well as regional inference, open models, and frontier Arabic-language models.

HUMAIN said it has been building for more than a year. In November 2025, it expanded its partnership with NVIDIA to deploy up to 600,000 of NVIDIA's latest AI systems over three years, including the GB300 platform. It also reached a data center agreement with xAI based on a facility with more than 500 MW of capacity, and a separate agreement with AWS to manage up to 150,000 GPUs in Riyadh's AI Zone. In the same month, HUMAIN, AMD, and Cisco formed a joint venture targeting up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure by 2030.