SEOUL, December 10 (AJP) - Tareq Amin, the CEO of Saudi Arabia's state-backed AI company HUMAIN, used his keynote at COMEUP 2025, South Korea's largest annual festival held at COEX in southern Seoul, on Wednesday to make a direct pitch to South Korean startups: consider Saudi Arabia as a place to build, scale and cut costs.
Amin described a country in the middle of an economic overhaul under its Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to move Saudi Arabia beyond its traditional dependence on oil and gas. He said the shift is opening space for new industries built around digital services, artificial intelligence, and large-scale data infrastructure. "It is the fastest, digitally growing economy today in the G20," he said, calling the current moment a rare opening for founders looking outside their home markets.
HUMAIN itself was formed earlier this year through a consolidation of entities backed by Saudi Aramco and the Public Investment Fund. Amin characterized the company as a full-stack AI player responsible for building out national data centers, developing foundation models, creating an AI-native enterprise operating system and launching a venture arm for joint investments. The name "HUMAIN," he noted, reflects the company's intention to keep people at the center of its technology.
Amin highlighted three factors he believes set Saudi Arabia apart for South Korean startups: energy, cost, and scale. He said the kingdom has enough available power to support multi-gigawatt AI data centers and is targeting as much as 6 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2034. According to Amin, Saudi Arabia aims to handle about 20 percent of the world's AI inferencing traffic by 2030. He also claimed that HUMAIN's cloud hosting costs are significantly lower than major markets, citing internal estimates showing roughly 47 percent lower inferencing costs.
He argued that Saudi Arabia's geographic position offers another advantage. With fiber links connecting the kingdom to multiple continents, he said the country can provide service reach to up to 4.4 billion people. "Power, land, connectivity — that is what gives us the chance to build something on a global scale," he said.
Amin repeatedly pointed to South Korea's strengths in hardware, memory, and engineering, saying the two countries complement each other. HUMAIN plans to open a Korean office in February to deepen its ties with South Korean AI startups and chip designers. "Korea builds amazing products, and in Saudi Arabia, we know how to build at scale," he said.
He also urged founders to think beyond South Korea's domestic market. "AI is a global race," he said. "Creating an amazing technology without finding a market for it does not mean a whole lot," Amin said Saudi Arabia's young population — the average age is about twenty-nine — and the country's willingness to adopt new technologies create a space where foreign startups can test and refine their products.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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