4th September 2026 – (Hong Kong) Shares in Hong Kong-listed artificial intelligence group MiniMax jumped about 10 per cent after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund-backed HUMAIN unveiled an Arabic-language model built on MiniMax’s open M3 system, extending the Shanghai company’s reach into the Middle East AI race.
HUMAIN, which is backed by the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, on Thursday released humain-m3, based on MiniMax M3, which can be downloaded and customised free of charge. The launch was presented as part of efforts to make Arabic more competitive at the frontier of generative AI while contributing to global model development.
HUMAIN has already poured money into data centres and chips in a bid to put Saudi Arabia on the global AI map. The company said the new model reflected its pledge to strengthen the Arabic AI ecosystem and to play a part in advancing cutting-edge intelligence worldwide.
According to its description, humain-m3 is a 428-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model further pre-trained on more than one trillion tokens of Arabic-native text. Across seven public Arabic benchmarks, HUMAIN said the model posted the highest average score among the frontier systems tested. Access is being offered through HUMAIN Node, a platform that gives developers and enterprises a channel to advanced models and inference.
HUMAIN chief executive Tareq Amin said Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people yet remains underrepresented at the AI frontier, and that humain-m3 was meant to help change that. The model is initially available as a research and evaluation preview on Node, with open weights planned under the MiniMax Community Licence after safety training, targeted for next month.
For MiniMax, listed in Hong Kong under stock code 00100, the partnership underscores a strategy of supplying base models that sovereign and regional operators can adapt with local language data.
