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Saudi Arabia gets the AWS treatment
Amazon Web Services is beefing up its Middle East game plan with a new cloud Region in Saudi Arabia, plus a bigger AI collaboration with HUMAIN. The company says the Region is still on track to launch in December, and the overall buildout represents more than $5.3 billion of planned cloud infrastructure spending.
Why this matters for the stock
If you’re an AWS bull, this is exactly the kind of news you want: more geography, more customers, more sticky infrastructure. AWS says the expansion will help support new industries and jobs in line with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 push — which is corporate-speak for: "we’re building the pipes where the next wave of apps and AI workloads will run."
The HUMAIN deal is where it gets interesting:
- Saudi Arabia’s first AI Zone could get up to 50 MW of capacity by 2028
- AWS Trainium chips will be part of the setup
- NVIDIA infrastructure is also in the mix for training and inference
- HUMAIN’s Arabic LLM ALLAM will live on Amazon Bedrock
- HUMAIN Fabric will be sold through AWS Marketplace
The AI land grab continues
AWS isn’t just selling servers and calling it a day. It’s also trying to make itself the on-ramp for AI development in the region, with startup mentoring, workforce training, and two innovation centers in Saudi Arabia. That’s the kind of ecosystem play that can turn a one-off contract into a long-term revenue stream.
And just to keep the Wall Street angle spicy, Rosenblatt’s fresh Buy call and $335 price target lean on the idea that investors are still underestimating AWS’s AI opportunity. Translation: the Street thinks this cloud story may have more runway than the stock price implies.
Big picture: AWS is basically saying, "If AI is the new oil, we want to own the refinery." And Saudi Arabia looks like one of the places it’s setting up shop.