Saudi Gazette report
RIYADH — Saudi Arabia’s artificial intelligence ambitions have taken a major leap forward with the official launch of HUMAIN Chat, an Arabic-first conversational AI application developed by HUMAIN, a company owned by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
This next-generation app is powered by ALLAM 34B, the most advanced large language model ever built in the Arab world, and is designed to deliver culturally fluent, bilingual interactions rooted in Arabic heritage and identity.
HUMAIN Chat is now publicly available on web, iOS, and Android platforms across Saudi Arabia, with wider regional and global expansion planned in the coming months.
Built in Saudi Arabia by Saudi talent and hosted entirely on sovereign infrastructure, the launch marks a turning point in generative AI for the Arabic-speaking world, bringing long-overdue linguistic and cultural inclusion to the digital age.
More than 400 million Arabic speakers and over 2 billion Muslims worldwide stand to benefit from a platform that finally reflects their language, values, and lived experience.
HUMAIN’s CEO, Tareq Amin, described the product’s release as a defining milestone for the Kingdom’s technology sector.
He emphasized that Saudi Arabia is proving its ability to deliver globally competitive technologies rooted in its own infrastructure, data, and identity.
Amin called HUMAIN Chat the beginning of a larger journey to accelerate innovation in the Kingdom and beyond, stating that the potential for economic and social impact is vast.
What distinguishes HUMAIN Chat is not only its fluency in Arabic but its architectural design as a sovereign, bilingual AI platform with global ambitions.
Powered by ALLAM 34B — a model independently ranked by Cohere as the highest-performing Arabic large language model in the region — the app allows users to interact fluidly in Arabic and English, switch languages mid-conversation, and receive real-time search-integrated responses.
Speech input is enabled across a wide range of Arabic dialects, and users can easily share full conversations with others. Importantly, the app is fully compliant with Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law and is entirely hosted on HUMAIN’s infrastructure within the Kingdom, ensuring privacy, security, and national data sovereignty.
The model behind the platform, ALLAM 34B, was trained on more than eight petabytes of data — the largest known Arabic dataset to date — and refined by a team of over 600 domain experts and 250 evaluators across sectors.
The result is an AI that delivers nuanced, contextually rich responses with deep cultural fluency. It draws from Islamic, Middle Eastern, and Arabic traditions to reflect the language and logic of its users.
The team responsible for the development includes more than 120 AI specialists, 35 of whom hold doctoral degrees, and represents a 50/50 gender split, an embodiment of the Kingdom’s emerging leadership in AI talent and intellectual property.
HUMAIN itself, launched in May 2025, operates as a full-stack AI company spanning four primary layers: infrastructure, cloud, data and models, and applications.
Its unified AI-native platform enables scalable deployment of real-world solutions, offering compute power, elastic cloud environments, secure data pipelines, and GPU-accelerated training capacity through next-generation data centers designed for hyperscale performance.
These facilities are engineered for the lowest total cost of ownership, offering both domestic clients and international partners a new standard in AI deployment.
The company is governed by a high-profile board chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and includes senior government ministers, PIF executives, and industry leaders such as the CEOs of Saudi Aramco and Sanabil Investments. Its leadership team includes CEO Tareq Amin, Deputy CEO Dr. Yaser Al-Onaizan, and senior executives overseeing data centers, AI models, cloud infrastructure, and global partnerships.
HUMAIN’s strategic ecosystem includes collaborations with some of the world’s most influential technology players.
Amazon Web Services has committed to invest more than $5 billion with HUMAIN to develop a pioneering AI Zone in Saudi Arabia, while NVIDIA is partnering to build AI factories capable of operating with several hundred thousand GPUs and up to 500 megawatts of computing power.
Qualcomm is working with HUMAIN to create hybrid AI platforms that operate across edge and cloud environments, while Cisco and AMD are jointly contributing to the development of a secure AI superstructure.
Meanwhile, Groq is hosting OpenAI’s open-source models within HUMAIN’s sovereign data centers, and Replit has launched a regionalized version of its platform on HUMAIN Cloud, complete with integrated Arabic coding support via ALLAM 34B.
At Cannes Lions, LUMA AI, in partnership with HUMAIN, unveiled an AI-native video generation engine known as HUMAIN Create, aimed at transforming content production in gaming, advertising, and film.
The release of HUMAIN Chat is the first offering in HUMAIN’s broader IQ product portfolio, a series of AI-native solutions designed to serve governments, enterprises, and consumers through sovereign models built on secure infrastructure. As usage grows, so too will the intelligence of the platform adapting in real-time to user behavior, regional needs, and evolving contexts.
