Ammon News - TIME magazine has selected Jordanian businessman Tariq Amin, CEO of the Saudi government-owned artificial intelligence company Humane, as one of the world's top 100 figures in the field of artificial intelligence.

Amin emerged as a prominent businessman during US President Donald Trump's meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets have helped it to become a major power player in the AI industry, as it seeks to diversify its economy beyond oil. In May, the kingdom announced the launch of Humain, a state-owned AI firm tasked with making Saudi Arabia a global technopower. Backed by the Crown Prince’s $1 trillion Public Investment Fund, Humain’s unveiling was timed to coincide with President Donald Trump’s headline-making tour of Riyadh, where Saudi leaders signed a $600 billion investment in American companies as tech executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang looked on.

Heading up Humain is Tareq Amin, the former chief executive of Saudi Aramco’s tech arm. His job: assure the Western world of Saudi loyalties by aligning with American technology—and write plenty of checks to get business rolling. Within days of its launch, the firm had signed agreements with companies including Nvidia, AMD, AWS, and Qualcomm to the tune of $23 billion. By August, it had a deal with AI accelerator chip company, Groq, using its inference platform in its Saudi data centers to serve OpenAI’s new open-weight models at lightning speeds.

Among Humain’s plans: construct massive data centers inside the kingdom, equip Saudi engineers with chip design capabilities, and emerge as a formidable player in global AI training and inferencing by 2030. “The world is hungry for capacity,” Amin told the Financial Times in May. “You [can] take it slow, and we are definitely not taking it slow, or you go fast. Whoever reaches the end line first, I think, is going to secure a good chunk of the market share.”