Aramco closes $2.6bn deal for 49% stake in Humain

Saudi Aramco's $2.6 billion bet on Humain signals the oil giant's aggressive pivot toward artificial intelligence, a sector it once left to Silicon Valley but now sees as essential to its energy transition strategy. The acquisition of nearly half the company—whose name suggests ambitions to merge human expertise with machine learning—represents one of the largest Middle Eastern investments in AI infrastructure and underscores how petrostates are racing to diversify beyond hydrocarbons before the energy landscape shifts irreversibly. For the global AI industry, the deal raises a thorny question: as authoritarian-adjacent governments pour capital into machine learning, who controls the technology's future development and whose values it encodes?

Arab News·1h ago