Saudi Firms Pledge More Than $20B In Data Center Projects Across U.S.

The Trump administration has put data centers front and center in touting what it says is Saudi Arabia’s commitment to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States.

Saudi Arabian data center firm DataVolt’s plan to spend $20B on U.S. data centers and energy infrastructure topped a list of deals announced by the Trump administration Tuesday, part of $600B in investment the White House says the president has secured while in Saudi Arabia.

Later, Saudi Arabia’s new state-backed artificial intelligence firm, Humain, announced a $10B partnership with U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices to develop 500 megawatts of data center capacity in both countries. 

Humain and DataVolt’s development plans came amid a wave of partnerships between Saudi ventures and U.S. tech firms announced Tuesday during President Donald Trump's appearance at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh.

Since the first day of his presidency, Trump has repeatedly highlighted data center development projects as examples of what he has portrayed as his direct involvement in securing foreign capital investment in the U.S.

Administration officials have framed the U.S.-Saudi digital infrastructure deals as critical to national security and to ensuring that American tech giants maintain pole position in the global AI arms race. 

“How do we win the AI race? The answer is that we have to build the biggest partner ecosystem,” White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks told the conference in Riyadh, according to The New York Times. “We need our friends like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other strategic partners and allies to want to build on our tech.”

DataVolt’s planned $20B data center build-out would mark the first U.S. projects for the firm, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabian development and investment holding company Vision Invest. Founded in 2023, the company says it is developing a pair of data centers in Saudi Arabia, along with campuses in Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

Neither DataVolt nor the Trump administration provided details about the scale or potential location of the data center firm’s U.S. expansion plans. However, hours after the White House announcement, DataVolt and U.S. chipmaker Supermicro jointly unveiled a separate $20B deal in which the San Jose-based server provider would supply computing power and supporting infrastructure for DataVolt’s data centers in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

DataVolt CEO Rajit Nanda said the firm’s data center would be powered by renewable energy and hydrogen, framing the deal as a way to meet the Trump administration’s goal of manufacturing data center components in the U.S.

“Our vision is to pair gigawatt-class renewable and net zero green hydrogen power with the industry’s most advanced server technology, giving customers access to unprecedented scale and sustainability,” Nanda said in a statement. “Partnering with Supermicro guarantees us a U.S.-made supply chain for critical GPU systems and positions DataVolt to accelerate our investment plans.”

Humain, a newly launched AI developer backed by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund, also provided little detail about its $10B data center venture with Santa Clara-based chipmaker AMD. Neither firm has indicated how much of the 500 MW of planned deployment will be in the United States, although Humain said it will oversee the development effort and infrastructure strategy.

The company said it expects a significant amount of capacity to come online by early 2026. 

Alongside its deal with AMD, Humain has announced AI partnerships this week with American cloud and IT firms Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Groq and Cisco, although none of those deals specify additional data center investment in the U.S. 

The United States is by far the world’s largest data center market and has experienced an unprecedented building boom for more than five years that has accelerated with the advent of AI. Still, Trump has repeatedly held up large-scale data center projects as evidence of his ability to bring direct foreign investment to the U.S. 

Even before taking office, Trump held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in early January alongside Damac Properties founder Hussain Sajwani to announce that the Emirati real estate firm would invest $20B to build data centers across the U.S. The deal includes data centers built in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana, Trump said.

Less than two weeks later, Trump wrapped up the first full day of his second term with an event announcing the creation of Stargate, an AI data center joint venture between cloud provider Oracle, artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, Emirati sovereign wealth fund MGX and Japanese investment firm SoftBank that its backers say will amount to a $500B investment. The first 10 data centers are already under construction in Abilene, Texas, at a site leased from data center firm Crusoe. That site is slated to expand to 20 buildings, with additional development planned throughout the U.S. 

While the heads of Oracle, SoftBank and OpenAI, who flanked Trump at the White House press conference, all said the Stargate venture wouldn't have materialized were it not for Trump’s presidency, plans for the project were first reported in March 2024, and construction began before Trump’s second term.