When my team first met TK, and the ones that didn't know you, by the way, I'm off script already, the ones that didn't know you were like, 'This guy's talking about all this stuff and I'm not sure, man, I don't know.' And I'm like, 'You don't know TK.' So why don't you talk a little bit about Humane and the idea behind it and how it started?
Well, I think as Chuck said, we've known each other for such a long time. But we always participated in driving significant disruption and innovation, and the marriage between building amazing technology and seeing its impact on humanity. I think you and I had the pleasure to see it. So when we decided to participate together and build Geo at the time, I mean, you remember when you entered...
That was pretty stress-free.
Oh, like no stress at all. There's only 1.4 billion people you have to cater for. In Besh, a different story. But the reality is we've seen and witnessed a country where at the time a symbol on our devices, you and I did not recognize, a 2G symbol coming in. And at the time, we're talking 10 years ago, we built the all-IP infrastructure, built this LTE network, changed the primitive in a country that went from 154th in the world in data index to being number one. And then in Japan, as Chuck said, when I pitched the idea, I said, 'I'm really obsessed about democratization of infrastructure,' and it's important, by the way, to the rationale and the reason and the business model of Humane as well. So I pitched to Chuck, I said, 'Chuck, I'm going to do something in telco that the world said cannot be done. We wanted to take legacy infrastructure design from proprietary hardware and move telco to a cloud-based infrastructure.' And yeah, it was true. I mean, everybody said that this was a crazy idea. It will not work. But really, this is the time where I loved and enjoyed the relationship that we built with the larger Cisco family. They actually were mostly my employees, to be honest with you, Chuck. I mean, so they believed in the mission.
They still are, actually. So in this journey of my life, I feel I'm really lucky and blessed that I worked in three continents before I started in the US. And I tell everybody, this is really where I learned innovation, went to India I learned scale, went to Japan I learned precision, moved to Saudi Arabia and this is where I really met ambition and vision. It's remarkable. So I was invited to participate in an event where I told many people, 'How much do you know actually about Saudi Arabia? Do you know that there's snow in the country?'
You know, so I said the assumption is maybe it's just desert, but there's snow, amazing crystal blue seas. So when I took this role, there is one thing that we talked, and I heard many of the speakers today talk about AI. And I thought the whole world is in a stage where we are supply-constrained. And I never thought, by the way, that there is such a thing that it was called an AI bubble or infrastructure demand will be lower than what it is today. And one thing that Humane was established on, and it probably would have been easier, Chuck, for me to, when I went to the chairman of the board, His Royal Highness, I said, 'Let me focus on one thing.' I pitched to my board an idea that we should be an AI company focused on the total AI value chain. So from data center, compute, diversified chips, models, applications, and AI solutions, which is an advisory business that we have. So company launched in August last year, and we've been really sprinting since August still today.
Yeah, it's really great. And so I guess there's a couple of places we could go here. First of all, when you talk about models, Arabic models as well as the infrastructure, the data centers, the full stack of everything, how do you think about how to balance the investments and what you're going to do and what you're not going to do?
Well, I mean, I think for me, think about it. It's five legal business entities that Humane is structured under. So Humane Core is actually our data center segment. It is the core, the shell, the mechanical, the power. So the unique value proposition that Saudi has to the world is really power and energy. There is an abundance in the country that is just utterly remarkable, and their energy is not only traditional energy but 20% of the energy is also renewable at an effective cost. So if we get this right, if we really get this right, what it means, we offer not just to local demands in the country, but international demands a value proposition that is very hard to match anywhere else. Power available today is north of 15 gigawatts of capacity on power, and at the right price, at the right tariffs. So that means your total cost of ownership could be anywhere between 20 to 30% cheaper. So I wear five hats during my day. I feel sometimes I'm a real estate developer, and a good portion of my work, obviously a lot of work in collaboration with the Saudi government and the US government on all of the imports that we have to do for different chips to obviously offer both inferencing and training. Our model team and science team are very much focused on the Arabic LLM, but there is no company like Humane would start if you don't fix the fundamental problem, the infrastructure. So this is really the key focus for us right now is to address the infrastructure not just for local workloads but really international workloads.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about one of the big scale issues is power, and you talked about how you have an advantage in Saudi. So we visited the Ministry of Energy.
And the room where we walked in and there were all these people sitting and they were working. Can you talk a little bit about how that process is working and how you feed requirements and what they're doing to actually help you?
Well, so I mean, I would tell you an experience that happened to me. I had the privilege of obviously working with many government entities both in Japan and India and the US, but something very, very unique about government in Saudi Arabia, it feels like it's a business, actually. So the way that the governments are structured, it's an enablement, not just regulators. So I'll tell all of you a story, honestly, really an amazing leader is His Royal Highness the Minister of Energy.
I went to him and I said to him, 'Your Royal Highness, this problem is very simple.'
This is the Crown Prince's brother.
And I told him that I am in need of identification of substations that have power on government land that's available adjacent to this power. In less than six weeks, what has happened is a miracle I have not seen. 16 government entities came together. They were working from the office of Ministry of Energy. Humane was there. This is private-public partnership at its best to serve a purpose to really accelerate Humane ambition. We have found from this six weeks of effort 211 pieces of land, north of 14 gigawatts of capacity that we could tap onto, no build is needed for substations. And that's really why I feel super optimistic about the future of where Humane is heading towards, and a very large reason of the success that we had and the acceleration that we had is how private-public entities are working together to support a larger national objective.
So if we asked a lot of other companies what their biggest impediment to scale is, it would be this issue of power and finding the right locations. So given that you, that's all easy for you. You got that all nailed.
Well, it's not easy. I'm just saying.
What is the biggest issue that you face in actually scaling?
