Saudi Arabia’s AI outfit Humain just dropped $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI. This broke today, February 18, 2026, and it’s one of those moves that feels massive on multiple levels.
Humain backed by the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and basically the state’s push to become an AI heavyweight pumped the cash into xAI’s Series E round. That round was already huge, upsized to $20 billion back in January.
This $3 billion slice made Humain a significant minority shareholder in xAI. Then, right after, Musk folded xAI into SpaceX in that blockbuster merger, so those shares converted straight into SpaceX equity. Bloomberg ballparks it at roughly 0.24% of the combined $1.25 trillion entity small percentage, but still a real stake in something that big.
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To be honest, the timing is wild. The investment landed just before the SpaceX acquisition was announced earlier this month. It’s like Saudi Arabia locked in before the value potentially moons even more, especially if that rumored IPO for the merged company happens later this year.
This isn’t their first dance either. Back in November 2025, at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum, Humain and xAI already teamed up for a 500MW AI data center build-out in Saudi Arabia, plus rolling out Grok models there.
So this funding deepens an existing partnership strategic investor plus on-the-ground collaborator. Saudi’s playing the long game here, diversifying hard from oil into tech and compute power.
Reactions? Not a ton of pushback popping up yet, but you can imagine the chatter. Musk’s ties with Saudi have been growing (remember earlier stakes via Kingdom Holding), and now a sovereign fund owns a piece of the Grok ecosystem.
Some folks might see it as smart capital chasing frontier AI; others could wonder about influence or geopolitics in the mix.Either way, it underscores how Middle Eastern money is flooding into the AI race big checks, big ambitions.
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xAI gets rocket fuel (pun intended) to scale models and infra faster, while Saudi positions itself as more than just an oil player. We’ll see how it plays out, but this feels like one of those quiet-but-huge shifts in the tech landscape. Interesting times.
Image Credit: Nairametrics
Source: Nairametrics
