Tag Archives: BlackRock and UAE

How AI Capital Flows to U.A.E.: the Tahnoon Coup

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Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial for half a billion dollars… The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.. 

The investment was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal who has been pushing the U.S. for access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips… Tahnoon—sometimes referred to as the “spy sheikh”—is brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president, the government’s national security adviser, as well as the leader of the oil-rich country’s largest wealth fund. He oversees a more than $1.3 trillion empire funded by his personal fortune and state money that spans from fish farms to AI to surveillance, making him one of the most powerful single investors in the world. The deal marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.

Under the Biden administration, Tahnoon’s efforts to get AI hardware had been largely stymied over fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China. Of particular concern was one of Tahnoon’s own companies, the AI firm G42, which had stoked alarm among intelligence officials and lawmakers over its close ties to the sanctioned tech giant Huawei and other Chinese firms…

In 2025, the Trump administration decided to supply UAE with access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters. The framework agreement called for roughly one-fifth of the chips to go to G42…

The agreement was widely viewed as a coup for the emirate’s ruling family, overcoming longstanding U.S. national security concerns …Proponents hailed the deal for unlocking a flood of investment into the U.S. and for helping entrench American technology as the global standard….What wasn’t publicly known: Tahnoon’s emissaries had signed the deal to purchase 49% of World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency firm controlled by the Trump family.

Excerpt from Sam Kessler et al., Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret Stake in Trump Company, WSJ, Jan. 31, 2026

Rich get Richer while “the Others” Hit the Floor

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The potential for capital markets to expand prosperity is the theme of 72-year-old Fink’s latest annual letter to shareholders, which touches on topics ranging from retirement policy to building out the electrical grid. He details two approaches to broadening access: helping current investors reach parts of the market previously restricted to them, and enabling more people to become investors in the first place.

“The country focuses heavily on preventing people from hitting the floor, as we should. But the U.S. needs to put just as much effort into helping people climb to the ceiling—through investing,” Fink wrote….“Assets that will define the future—data centers, ports, power grids, the world’s fastest-growing private companies—aren’t available to most investors,” he wrote. “They’re in private markets, locked behind high walls, with gates that open only for the wealthiest or largest market participants.”

Excerpt from Jack Pitcher, Larry Fink Says Regular Americans Need Private Assets Too, WSJ, Mar. 31, 2025

Why OpenAI Flirts with UAE and What Happened to Women’s Rights

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In February 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the UAE could serve as the world’s “regulatory sandbox” to test artificial intelligence. Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s first official trip to the United States in September 2024 aimed to push the United Arab Emirates-U.S. relationship to a new “geo-economic phase” centered on economic growth and innovation..,

Microsoft has invested  $1.5 billion investment in the UAE’s top artificial intelligence firm, G42, in April.   BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft and the Mubadala-backed MGX investment company also recently announced the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, underscoring the UAE’s strategic focus on U.S. technology and AI to drive future economic growth…The United States and the UAE have a trade and investment partnership that spans more than five decades. In 2023, bilateral trade between the UAE and the U.S. was worth around $31.4 billion, with U.S. exports to the UAE exceeding $24.8 billion, according to the UAE Embassy in Washington, D.C. The UAE, which produces nearly 4% of the world’s oil supply, also has investments in the United States that total $1 trillion. The UAE sovereign wealth funds including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Mubadala are major investors in American real estate, infrastructure and technology sectors.

The UAE has remained a key strategic defense and security partner to Washington, playing host to the American air base in Al Dhafra, while working as a key partner alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq….

On the systemic discrimination against women at the UAE, see letter of Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch has documented numerous incidents of enforced disappearances by the UAE in recent years, including the case of three Emirati sisters who were forcibly disappeared in 2015 after posting comments critical of the government on social media. Human Rights Watch has also documented cases of denial of adequate medical care to women who have since died or attempted suicide

Excerpt from Emma Graham and Dan Murphy, UAE hoping to expand $1 trillion partnership with U.S. through AI, Investment, CNBC, Sept. 20, 2024