On the opening day of LEAP 2026, in front of one of the biggest audiences in tech, Applied Intuition co-founder and CEO Qasar Younis joined HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin on the main stage to announce a strategic collaboration: The two companies will deploy thousands of autonomous trucks throughout Saudi Arabia's key logistics corridors by 2030, creating the largest autonomous trucking network in the world. The collaboration will establish a foundational framework for autonomy across the Kingdom, with the goal of expanding into other industries including robotaxis, manufacturing, and agriculture.
For years, AI has lived inside screens, but now it’s moving to the physical world: into the trucks, ports, mines, and fleets that keep the global economy running. The announcement showed how physical AI is now poised to be built at national scale, and made Applied Intuition's LEAP debut one of the defining moments of the conference.
The stage suited the scale of the news. Now in its fifth edition, LEAP drew more than 200,000 attendees, 1,800 global tech brands, 600 startups, and over 1,000 speakers. It's where governments and companies come to announce their most ambitious bets on the future. This year, one of the biggest belonged to physical AI.
On the main stage, Younis and Amin spoke in front of a video of their driverless truck in action on Saudi roads.
"This is physical AI at a national scale," Younis said. "It's the first time that it's being done, ever, in the history of mankind."
The collaboration is the first major initiative under HUMAIN's physical AI strategy, which extends intelligence beyond the data center and into the systems that deliver real-world impact. It pairs HUMAIN's sovereign AI infrastructure with Applied Intuition's end-to-end physical AI stack, including its Self-Driving System (SDS), Vehicle OS, and supporting vehicle intelligence offerings. Autonomous trucking comes first, with future phases expanding into robotaxis, ports, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction.
At the HUMAIN x Applied Intuition booth, attendees could walk around a driverless truck like the ones that will soon run throughout Saudi logistics corridors, watching in real time as the perception suite built a 360-degree picture of the world around it. Nearby, screens showed footage of the technology at work: a HUMAIN truck on the streets of Riyadh, and Level 4 autonomous trucks operating with Isuzu in Japan.
In a conversation with Benjamin Butterworth, a senior editor at The i Paper, Younis explained what it takes to execute a deployment of this scale.
"It takes vision. You have to have the desire to do it. It takes ambition. So not only do you have a goal, but then you take action against that goal,” he said, adding that individuals like Amin were crucial in bringing this to life. “All those pieces, we just talk about them like they're easy, but they don't exist in most places on the planet."
Physical AI is the next major frontier after a decade of intelligence living inside software, and it answers urgent demand. Mining accounts for 1% of the global workforce but 8% of workplace fatalities; the average American farmer is 58; and in Japan, where Applied Intuition has deployed autonomous trucks, there is a driver shortage severe enough that the government declared it an urgent issue. Rather than building a vertical solution, Applied Intuition is a horizontal technology provider: one platform relying on the same models and operating system to run mines, ports, trucks, and driverless cars across the US, Europe, and Japan. That diversity of data, Younis said, compounds across every vertical.
It’s also why this partnership looks different from a typical technology deal. Deployments elsewhere tend to be "vacuum-sealed" to a single manufacturer, port, or mine, Younis said. In the Kingdom, the goal is for the technology to serve as a foundation for ongoing physical AI deployments, from thousands of driverless trucks to robotaxis, automated ports, and mines. Applied Intuition has opened an office in Riyadh and is hiring a local technical team to launch, operate, and scale autonomous fleets, part of a long-term commitment to making the Kingdom a global center for autonomous logistics.
During a panel discussion on the embodiment of intelligence, Applied Intuition's Head of Engineering Adriano Quiroga sat alongside Dr. Amjad Obeidat of HUMAIN and Shikuan Chen of Compal Electronics. A focus of the discussion was how the partnership between HUMAIN and Applied Intuition will move autonomous trucking from proven deployments abroad to thousands of vehicles operating across the Kingdom by 2030.
The conversation moved beyond technical breakthroughs to something more fundamental: deployment. Quiroga emphasized that shipping physical AI at national scale isn’t just about software and hardware, it starts with people. “We’ve already found a lot of people here who have the hunger to learn and get better at developing these technologies,” he said. “It starts by finding those people, hiring those people, and bringing them into the fold.”
If the last decade of AI was about intelligence in software, the next decade will be about intelligence in the physical world. Together, HUMAIN and Applied Intuition are working to bring the impact to an entire nation.
