• Former Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin is at the helm of Saudi Arabia’s recently launched AI infrastructure company, Humain
• Amin is now building his executive team
• A number of senior executives with telecom sector experience are on board

Humain, the recently formed AI infrastructure company funded by Saudi Arabia’s PIF (Public Investment Fund) and headed up by former Rakuten Mobile CEO Tareq Amin, is adding to its executive ranks and has signed up some familiar names from the telecom sector to help get the outfit up and running.   

George Nazi, who has held senior management roles at BT Group, Alcatel-Lucent (since acquired by Nokia), Google Cloud and most recently at Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI, also owned by PIF), has joined as Humain’s president of AI applications and solutions.

“George has shaped the future of telecom, cloud and enterprise AI,” stated Humain in this LinkedIn post. “With deep experience building unicorns and running global tech organisations with 40,000+ professionals, he blends visionary leadership with hands-on execution. Now at Humain, he’s powering the next wave of applied AI – at scale, with impact.” 

Amin noted: “I’ve had the privilege of working with George in the past and have always admired his rare ability to connect strategy to execution – solving complex problems and scaling AI solutions with speed and precision.”

Joining as Humain’s executive VP of technology is Dr Khalid Alodhaibi. “With 30+ years of global experience across organisations including AT&T, IBM and Saudi Arabia’s National Center for AI, Khalid has built mission-critical systems, led AI infrastructure design and builds for Arabic LLMs [large language models], and driven technology transformation across healthcare, defence and enterprise sectors. From Saudi Arabia to San Jose and back again, he now powers Humain’s enterprise architecture and technology stack – AI from silicon to software,” the company announced in this LinkedIn post. 

And heading up Humain’s datacentre business is Jeff Thomas, the founder of Ark Data Centres and co-founder of UKCloud. “A pioneer of sovereign datacentre and cloud infrastructure, Jeff has built over $5bn in economic value across digital infrastructure, cloud and data ecosystems. He brings four decades of experience leading high-security, energy-efficient platforms for government, military and enterprise,” and is now “building the datacentre backbone of Humain’s AI-first future,” the company noted. 

Dr Yaser Al-Onaizan, who led the Saudi Arabia National Centre for AI’s LLM effort and whose CV includes stints at Amazon, AWS and IBM Research, has been appointed as deputy CEO and president of the data and AI models unit, with Humain referring to him as “a visionary shaping the future of Al in Saudi Arabia and beyond.”

Humain burst onto the AI infrastructure scene in May with plans to “provide a comprehensive range of AI services, products and tools, including next-generation datacentres, AI infrastructure and cloud capabilities, and advanced AI models and solutions. The company will also offer one of the world’s most powerful multimodal Arabic large language models,” which refers to ALLaM. Humain also has international ambitions. 

To get the ball rolling in Saudi Arabia, though, Humain has struck relationships with multiple tech giants, including Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cisco Systems. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV