Following on May 13's "Saudi Crown Prince Sets Up Potential AI Juggernaut Which Immediately Partners With Nvidia (NVDA)".
From The Next Platform, May 14:
The oil barons of the Middle East have been trying to diversify out of carbon fuels and into other parts of the global economy for decades, but artificial intelligence may be a game that only hyperscalers, cloud builders, and Middle East sovereign wealth funds can play at the highest levels and maybe, in the long run, only the latter can tilt the AI playing field to their advantage.
Even the largest national governments on planet cannot throw the kind of money at the next wave of AI like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (with Abu Dhabi and Dubai being the two important ones among the seven emirates), and Qatar can easily do.
And frankly, are doing, because the price of a barrel of oil is not as high as it has been and it is time to make money some other way.
The UAE has made some big splashes with their G42 and MGX investment arms, doling out huge wads of cash to Cerebras Systems to build infrastructure in the Middle East and train Arabic models and OpenAI’s Stargate Project, which has Softbank doing compute engine stuff and Oracle doing cloud stuff but MGX footing most of the $500 billion bill to create infrastructure for OpenAI over the next four years to what unknown leverage for the UAE.
And today, Saudia Arabia, the largest and richest oil producer in the world, ruled by Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the crown prince and the prime minister of the country and also the chairman of the board of directors of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, is throwing its wealth into the ring.
The last ranking we can find of the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East came out in Arab News in March 2024, and it put the PIF at $925 billion, up 55 percent from 2022’s fund value. The Abu Dhabu Investment Authority had $993 billion of assets under management as 2023 came to a close, and if you add the three big Abu Dhabi funds together, they totaled $1.4 trillion. If you add all of assets under management by the sovereign funds of the Gulf States together, they were over $4 trillion as 2023 came to a close. Not all of this is liquid, of course, which is ironic given the nature of the source of the wealth, but clearly the Gulf States can invest at a very high level.
Just to give you the contrast, in their most recent quarters, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta Platforms had a combined $340 billion in cash and investments on hand. This is a fraction of the wealth of the Gulf States, which is why we see the GPU and APU makers and now their customers sucking up to them. It is also something that the Trump administration was not eager to talk about when talking about the Stargate Project investment. Larry Ellison of Oracle, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, and Sam Altman of OpenAI were at the White House, but the real money behind the Stargate Project comes from Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the son of the founder of the UAE and also its national security advisor, deputy ruler of Abu Dhabi, and brother of the president of the UAE, who is also is chairman of G42 and also chairman of MGX....
....MUCH MORE
