Saudi education sector sees 86% annual rise in investment licenses

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia has become the first country in the region to host OpenAI’s newly released publicly available models through a deployment announced by HUMAIN and Groq.

The gpt-oss-120B and gpt-oss-20B models are operated on Groq’s high-speed inference infrastructure located within HUMAIN’s sovereign data centers in the Kingdom. 

The move is part of broader efforts to localize advanced artificial intelligence infrastructure, aligning with national regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. Saudi Arabia’s deployment of OpenAI’s open-source models within domestic infrastructure supports a wider strategy to diversify its economy and position itself as a key player in global AI.

Under Vision 2030, the Kingdom envisions a digital economy powered by AI, investing heavily in sovereign compute infrastructure to support emerging markets across Africa and Asia.

HUMAIN, a company backed by the Public Investment Fund, said the deployment will enable Saudi-based developers, researchers, and enterprises to access AI tools that were previously limited by infrastructure or compliance constraints. 

Groq, a US-based company specializing in AI inference hardware, provides a custom-built processing platform designed to deliver consistent, high-speed performance. 

HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin described the development as a step forward in achieving technological self-reliance. 

“With the deployment of OpenAI’s most powerful open models, hosted right here inside the Kingdom, Saudi developers, researchers, and enterprises now have direct access to the global frontier of AI — fully aligned with our national regulations and data laws,” he said. 

The company claims that the gpt-oss-120B model operates at more than 500 tokens per second, while the gpt-oss-20B exceeds 1,000 tokens per second on its platform. 

The establishment of HUMAIN by PIF in May, backed by commitments from Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Amazon Web Services, illustrates this push, with multi‑billion‑dollar agreements to expand local AI compute capacity, data centers, and foundational models. 

The infrastructure is positioned as fully sovereign, meaning all data handling complies with Saudi regulations. 

This could be significant for organizations in the public and private sectors that require local hosting of data-intensive applications. The companies did not disclose commercial terms or usage projections. 

Groq CEO Jonathan Ross said the partnership expands the company’s reach into the Middle East. 

“Our partnership with HUMAIN gives us a powerful regional and globally central presence in one of the fastest-growing AI ecosystems on the planet,” Ross said. 

The announcement builds on a partnership first disclosed in May and aligns with Saudi Arabia’s national strategy to become a competitive player in global AI development. 

HUMAIN had previously stressed its ambition to develop AI capabilities across infrastructure, foundational models, and sector-specific applications. 

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said the US will impose a tariff of about 100 percent on imports of semiconductors but offered up a big exemption — it will not apply to companies that are manufacturing in the US or have committed to do so.

The move is part of Trump’s efforts to bring manufacturing back to the US, and his remarks on Wednesday were made in tandem with an announcement that Apple would be investing an additional $100 billion in its home market.

For companies like Apple, which have committed to build in the US, “there will be no charge,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

He warned, however, that companies should not try to wrangle out of pledges to build US factories.

“If, for some reason, you say you’re building and you don’t build, then we go back and we add it up, it accumulates, and we charge you at a later date, you have to pay, and that’s a guarantee,” Trump added.

The comments were, however, not a formal tariff announcement, and much remains unclear about how companies and countries around the world will be impacted.

Trump’s mention of the proposed 100 percent rate for chips came in just ahead of US levies of 10 percent to 50 percent kicking in on Thursday for many goods from dozens of trading partners.

Rates on semiconductors and other key tech goods have been the subject of a US national security probe — the results of which are expected to be announced by mid-August.

Trump’s Wednesday remarks produced an immediate flurry of reactions from concerned countries and business lobbies.

South Korea’s top trade envoy said on Thursday that major chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will not be subject to 100 percent tariffs, and South Korea will have the most favorable levies on semiconductors under a trade deal between Washington and Seoul.

Samsung and SK Hynix declined to comment.

On the other end of the spectrum, the president of the Philippine semiconductor industry, Dan Lachica, said Trump’s plan would be “devastating” for his country.

In Malaysia, which is a big player in chip testing and packaging globally, trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz warned parliament his country “will risk losing a major market in the United States if its products become less competitive as a result of the imposition of these tariffs.”

Survival of the biggest

Taiwan’s National Development Council Minister Liu Chin-ching told reporters on Thursday that Taiwanese companies have been building US plants or buying US firms with local factories as well as collaborating with US chipmakers to counter potential chip tariffs.

Taiwanese chip contract manufacturer TSMC is expected to be relatively unscathed as it has US factories, so key customers such as Nvidia are unlikely to face increased tariff costs for US-made chips.

Nvidia, which makes cutting-edge AI graphics processing units, also plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the US TSMC did not immediately reply to a request for comment, and an Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment.

“Large, cash-rich companies that can afford to build in America will be the ones to benefit the most. It’s survival of the biggest,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at investment advisory firm Annex Wealth Management.

Congress created a $52.7 billion semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program in 2022. The Commerce Department under President Joe Biden last year convinced all five leading-edge semiconductor firms to locate chip factories in the US as part of the program.

The department said the US last year produced about 12 percent of semiconductor chips globally, down from 40 percent in 1990.

“There’s so much serious investment in the United States in chip production that much of the sector will be exempt,” said Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

He added that chips made by China’s SMIC or Huawei are unlikely to be exempt, but noted that chips from these companies entering the US market were mostly incorporated into devices assembled in China.

“If these tariffs were applied without a component tariff, it might not make much difference,” he said.

The EU has said it agreed to a single 15 percent tariff rate for the vast majority of EU exports, including cars, chips and pharmaceuticals. Japan has said that the US agreed not to give it a worse tariff rate than other countries on chips.

Shares in Asian chipmakers with big US investment plans climbed on Thursday, with TSMC and Samsung up 4.4 percent and 2 percent respectively. Silicon wafer producer GlobalWafers, which has a plant in Texas, jumped 10 percent.

GlobalWafers said it has proactively implemented cost reduction strategies and believes it has an opportunity to maintain competitiveness.