Inside Saudi Arabia's AI Ambition: Tareq Amin on Building a New Tech Superpower
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I believe connectivity is a human right. I felt that this is a great opportunity to really build and enable a country like Saudi Arabia that has incredible potential and capability to really build a digital champion and a digital hub for the region. This is the first time I landed in a place where I feel I'm home.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Humane's Tarek Amin.
See you. Hi, David. Good to you.
So I've been spending a lot more time in The Middle East, in the region. It's changing so dramatically year after year, and I'm gonna be I announced on the podcast two weeks ago, I'll be doing Foundry University in Riyadh on November. And I'm really excited to partner with such a dynamic country. Maybe you could fill us in on what's changed over the last five years in the region.
Well, thank you very much. First of all, I must say, it's the first time I did an event that's only forty five minutes away from my home. My flight from Riyadh, obviously, was twenty three hours. But just to give you some context, I was born in Amman, Jordan before coming to The US to finish my studies and, you know, progress in my life and my career. So I moved from Tokyo to Saudi Arabia, but this is the first time I ever worked in the region. And I didn't know what to expect, you know. You know, sometimes it depend it depends on your perspective on how you look at the world, you know. I want
Tarek, can you maybe explain what Humane is and how it came to be because it's it was sort of an evolution. Right?
Yeah. I mean, it's it's you know, for for you to know I'll tell you, we take things for granted in The US to a certain extent. Let's assume you're a start up here and you want to access compute. It's as simple as obviously going to a hyperscaler and within thirty seconds, you're ready to go. So, this story is fascinating because my first discovery, let's say, the role I was in at the time, I was hired, to really run a subsidiary of Aramco, a new company that was intended diversify out of its core business in which digital and AI was a really core component of it. One of the biggest surprises I
Mohammed bin Salih.
Yeah. And let me tell you, it was not about brainstorming. It was about really addressing what the country needs to do to accelerate, to address some of the fragmentation that exist. And the idea and the concept of humane is in order for us to really accelerate our development, let us now bring public and private entity, combines and take AI investments, projects, initiatives, and put them under one umbrella company that is really focused on the entire AI total value chain. So honestly, in that meeting, I I could tell you it took about ten minutes to come to realization that the opportunity is
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