Strategic investments by sovereign wealth funds mark a significant shift in global tech leadership. We discuss what’s driving these investments and which firms are leading the charge.
OpenAI, Lucid Motors, and Mistral are all funded by Gulf sovereign wealth funds.
Over the past few years, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and the UAE’s Mubadala Investment Company have been investing heavily in artificial intelligence and climate technology, including its infrastructure and governance.
PIF has become a heavyweight in the AI landscape, backing firms that are designing the backbone of the future tech-scape.
A key highlight of this push is its investment in Mistral, a French generative AI startup rapidly emerging as Europe’s answer to American and Chinese led AI firms.
Mistral’s open-source large language models, funded in part by Sanabil Investments (a PIF affiliate), position Saudi Arabia squarely at the centre of global AI innovation.
PIF has also doubled down on Databricks—a data and AI powerhouse out of the U.S. that enables large-scale AI deployment in regulated industries. Together, these moves give Saudi Arabia not just equity, but intellectual and strategic capital.
In collaboration with Saudi’s Aramco Digital, U.S.-based semiconductor firm Groq is helping develop ultra-fast AI data centres inside the Kingdom.
Meanwhile, Cerebras, famous for its wafer-scale chip technology, is working with local partners to establish capabilities for training and inference at a national level. And then there’s OmniOps, a Saudi homegrown startup with SAR 30 million in funding, building sovereign AI clusters powered by the likes of Google Cloud and NVIDIA. These clusters are more than just technical marvels; they’re strategic assets that will allow Saudi businesses to leverage generative AI securely, efficiently, and independently.
In tandem with its AI ambitions, PIF continues to drive green energy innovation. One of its headline investments is Lucid Motors, a U.S.-based electric vehicle manufacturer that opened its first overseas plant in King Abdullah Economic City this year.
The move is part of a larger plan to electrify 30% of vehicles in Riyadh by 2030, aligning with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goals of environmental sustainability and to reduce carbon emissions.
But this is not merely about importing an EV trend. By fostering a local EV production ecosystem, Saudi Arabia is laying the groundwork for a new industrial future—one that replaces oil with electric innovation as its growth engine.
In the UAE, a different but equally ambitious playbook is unfolding. Mubadala Investment Company is betting big on global AI through a powerful alliance with G42, one of the UAE’s leading AI firms.
Together, they’ve launched MGX, a massive $30 billion AI infrastructure fund in partnership with some of the biggest names in tech—Microsoft, NVIDIA, BlackRock, and xAI.
Through MGX, Mubadala has secured equity stakes in the most influential players in AI today, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks. These are not just financial bets—they are long-term strategic entries into the inner circle of AI research, policy, and product development.
Crucially, the UAE isn’t just investing abroad; it’s building the internal scaffolding to sustain and grow these technologies at home. From data centres to sovereign cloud platforms and chip design labs, Abu Dhabi is constructing a complete AI ecosystem.
Its aim is clear: to not only deploy but also shape the future of artificial intelligence—technically, commercially, and ethically. With its AI Strategy 2031 in full swing, the UAE is emerging as a global AI R&D nucleus, blending capital strength with regulatory foresight.
Why are these Gulf nations pouring billions into AI and climate tech? It’s a calculated and multidimensional strategy.
First, economic diversification is essential. As the world shifts from hydrocarbons to data and renewables, countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are ensuring they stay relevant and wealthy.
Second, building domestic AI infrastructure offers digital sovereignty in a world where compute power is geopolitical leverage.
Third, these investments allow the Gulf to project soft power globally—by funding the tools that shape everything from autonomous vehicles to defence tech.
And fourth, with some of the cheapest energy on Earth, the Gulf is uniquely positioned to host energy-hungry AI data centers and manufacturing units, giving it a comparative advantage no Silicon Valley can match.
By mid-2024, Gulf sovereign wealth funds have deployed over $3.5 billion into AI and clean energy projects. It is an astonishing figure that signals a fundamental transformation.
No longer passive investors, Gulf nations are architects of a new economic paradigm. From chipmakers and AI labs to EV factories and data clusters, the infrastructure of the future is being built not just in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, but in Riyadh and Dubai.
In the grand sweep of global transformation, the Middle East is pivoting from oil wells to neural nets, from fossil fuels to gigafactories, and from economic dependency to strategic leadership, and confidently positioning itself as the connective driver between big tech and trade.
