Elon Musk Confirms Construction of Large-Scale xAI Data Facility in Saudi Arabia

On Wednesday, Musk — who leads xAI and Tesla — revealed a major new xAI data center project in Saudi Arabia. The facility, developed in collaboration with HUMAIN AI, a company backed by the country’s sovereign wealth fund, will have a capacity of 500 megawatts and run on Nvidia’s advanced computing hardware.

For comparison, xAI’s existing Colossus 1 supercomputing site in Memphis, considered one of the world’s most powerful clusters, operates at roughly 300 megawatts.

In a separate announcement, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Amazon Web Services will build a 100-megawatt data center in the region, with plans to scale much higher — describing the project as having “gigawatt ambition and counting.” It too will rely on Nvidia’s chips.

The news follows Tuesday’s signing of a new U.S.–Saudi AI Memorandum of Understanding, which the White House says allows the kingdom access to top-tier American AI systems while safeguarding U.S. technology from foreign interference.

During an appearance at the Kennedy Center alongside Huang and Saudi communications minister Abdullah Alswaha, Musk painted a futuristic picture involving humanoid robots and space-based AI infrastructure.

Musk predicted that robots would eventually become the most valuable and widely used product globally, even suggesting that automation could make traditional work optional.

Looking further ahead, he said that within four or five years, the most affordable way to run AI computation might be through solar-powered satellites.

Musk briefly misspoke during the announcement, initially citing a 500-gigawatt data center — a scale far exceeding global data center power consumption — before joking that such a facility would cost “8 bazillion trillion dollars.