Qualcomm Technologies and HUMAIN have announced plans to establish a Qualcomm AI Engineering Center in Riyadh, marking the next phase of their collaboration to expand AI infrastructure and technical capability in Saudi Arabia. The center, which is scheduled to open in December 2025, will sit within HUMAIN’s facilities and support the rollout of 200 megawatts of data-center capacity beginning in 2026. This deployment will rely on Qualcomm’s Cloud AI hardware, including its AI200 and AI250 rack solutions, which are designed for high-efficiency inference workloads.
The initiative reflects Saudi Arabia’s ongoing push to position itself as a regional hub for advanced AI development. HUMAIN, supported by the Public Investment Fund, has been working with global technology suppliers to scale both compute capacity and the local engineering talent needed to operate it. Qualcomm’s role centers on supplying the underlying hardware and providing engineering support for integrating these systems into HUMAIN’s broader edge-to-cloud services. The new center is expected to offer capabilities in model onboarding, customer engineering, ecosystem development and AI training—functions that are essential for operationalizing large-scale AI systems but typically overlooked in infrastructure-only announcements.
By co-locating the engineering center with HUMAIN’s teams, both companies aim to shorten deployment timelines for new services and reduce friction between hardware integration, software optimization and customer-facing applications. As AI models become increasingly complex and demand for cost-efficient inference grows, the focus on total cost of ownership is becoming a differentiating factor for regions competing to attract AI-driven industries. Qualcomm and HUMAIN are positioning their collaboration around this metric, highlighting the potential for lower operating costs compared with conventional GPU-based data-center architectures.
Statements from Qualcomm’s leadership frame the center as a technology development hub intended to streamline service rollout. HUMAIN’s perspective emphasizes the partnership’s role in accelerating the country’s AI infrastructure strategy and aligning with national objectives to localize innovation. Beyond the corporate messaging, the practical outcome—if executed effectively—could be the growth of a local workforce capable of supporting large-scale AI deployments and reducing reliance on external engineering resources.
As countries and companies race to build AI-ready infrastructure, engineering centers such as this one represent an important piece of the puzzle: providing the technical depth required to turn raw compute capacity into real services. The success of the initiative will depend on execution, sustained investment, and the ability to convert hardware installations into functioning, scalable AI solutions across industries.
