Securing the 51 percent stake in Hiyomayn: The Fund leads high-performance computing and the 'Alam' model with Aramco investments
Saudi Aramco closed a deal to acquire a 49 percent stake in the artificial-intelligence company Hiyomayn through one of its wholly-owned subsidiaries, a move that included cash contributions of about 9.9 billion riyals, or roughly 2.6 billion dollars in 2026, along with the transfer of advanced digital and computing assets. This arrangement leaves control with the Public Investment Fund at 51 percent, and the partners announced the completion of a plan that began taking shape in October 2025, with the founding entity launching in May 2025 toward an operational phase that blends industrial capital with digital sovereignty.
The bet here does not stop at cash financing but extends to unifying computing and data under one umbrellaIt aims to build an operational capacity of 3 gigawatts from AI data centres by 2030. Hiyomayn moves through four integrated tracks: next-generation data centres, high-performance computing infrastructure and cloud platforms, advanced model development, and at the forefront the multi-modal language model ‘Allam’ tailored for Arabic applications, plus specialised industrial software.
Statements from the leaders of the two companies reflect the direct economic motives behind this merger. Aramco’s chief executive and senior executive, Amin Al-Nasir, said the company has realised a technology value of 11.3 billion dollars since 2023, with AI solutions playing a prominent role, making investment in Hiyomayn a way to strengthen industrial operations and open new revenue channels. In contrast, Yazeed Al-Hamied, deputy governor of the Public Investment Fund and head of the Middle East and North Africa investment division, sees bringing technical portfolios under the company’s umbrella accelerating intellectual-property development, nurturing local talent, and expanding technical impact.
Securing the majority stake for the Public Investment Fund guarantees that the computing infrastructure remains aligned with national priorities, while Aramco’s assets give the system an immediate test in complex work environments.This integration moves the company from merely a server-space provider to an owner of both infrastructure and model, with the Allam model integrating with high-performance computing capacities to provide a training and inference environment that serves both government and commercial sectors.
What actually changes for institutions and technical teams in the Gulf, Egypt, and the region as a result of this closing? Practically, it means the entry of computing capacities of this size and the building of Arabic models supported by local infrastructure, transforming hosting and development choices. Start-ups and software engineering teams that had relied solely on global cloud services and borne data-transfer costs and latency will find a competitive regional infrastructure that lowers the cost of model invocation and offers an environment compliant with data-localisation requirements. It also forces technology leaders in banks and operational sectors to reassess procurement strategies, balancing the purchase of off-the-shelf software licences from abroad against building their own solutions on models and hosting frameworks that operate within the region.
The completion of this deal places high-performance computing in an advanced position within the new-economy toolkit, where power and computational capacity become inseparable assets. As work progresses toward the 3 gigawatt goal by 2030, focus shifts from announcing partnerships to measuring operational efficiency and monitoring the national models’ ability to meet the needs of critical sectors that require precise and continuous computing performance.