After new energy, funds from the Middle East have turned their attention toAI.
Author Wang Manhua
This article has 4092 words
Manual labor ratio丨90% AI content丨10%
MiniMax has gained attention again because of a large model released by Saudi Arabia.
Recently, HUMAIN, an AI company under the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), officially launched the large language model HUMAIN M3. This is the first Arabic large model in Saudi history, and the chairman of HUMAIN is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
However, the model truly sparked domestic interest due to an official detail later revealed: The foundation of HUMAIN M3 is MiniMax's flagship model MiniMax M3, which will be released and open-sourced in June 2026.
A national-level AI project funded by a sovereign fund and led personally by the Crown Prince, yet built on the foundation of a large model company from China, sounds a bit like dark humor, but it also indirectly indicates that China's large models are becoming an unavoidable technical option for some countries when building their local AI capabilities.
Leaving aside this layer of drama, the investment in AI in the Middle East over the past two years has indeed been substantial. The most typical example is the PIF, which manages a scale of about 1 trillion USD and planned to create an AI fund of about 40 billion USD as early as 2024. Additionally, Abu Dhabi's MGX recently closed the largest specialized AI fund in history at 49 billion USD; the Qatar Investment Authority has established a 20 billion USD joint venture fund for AI infrastructure... From Riyadh to Abu Dhabi to Doha, the entire Gulf is betting in the same direction.
China is undoubtedly an unavoidable stop in this round of "shopping". Just casually flipping through the funding lists of AI companies like Zhihua, MiniMax, Digua Robotics, and Qianxun Intelligence, you can see the presence of Middle Eastern capital. Among them, the investment of 213 million yuan by the Prosperity7 fund under Saudi Aramco in Zhihua, calculated at today's market value of 360.8 billion HKD, has reached a corresponding value of 4.3 billion HKD (approximately 3.7 billion yuan), which is around 17 times the principal.
After new energy, funds from the Middle East have turned their attention to AI.
From computing power to models: The Middle East has invested in the entire AI stack
How strong is the Middle East's determination to bet on AI? A set of data can illustrate this—according to the annual report released by the sovereign wealth fund research organization Global SWF in January this year, last year, global sovereign wealth funds invested about 66 billion USD in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure. Among them, Gulf funds with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar as absolute main forces accounted for a staggering 43%.
Entering 2026, the actions of Middle Eastern capital have clearly stepped up a level—single investment amounts have started to jump to tens of billions of dollars.
Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly the main driver of this leap in scale. During the Davos Forum in January 2026, HUMAIN signed a strategic financing framework agreement worth up to 1.2 billion USD with the Saudi National Infrastructure Fund (Infra) for the expansion of AI and digital infrastructure in Saudi Arabia; in February, HUMAIN announced participation in xAI's Series E investment, amounting to 3 billion USD, becoming a significant minority shareholder.
The latest footnote occurred earlier this month during the fifth LEAP conference, where HUMAIN announced it had reached project cooperation agreements worth over 15 billion USD, infiltrating its business across various layers of the technology stack, from power and data centers to models and hardware.
Abu Dhabi's specialized AI fund MGX is also making investments with a high frequency. In January, it participated in xAI's Series E financing led by Musk; in February, it led a 30 billion USD financing round for Anthropic; in March, it led a funding of 122 billion USD for OpenAI; followed by another appearance in May in Anthropic's financing round valued at 965 billion USD, contributing 65 billion USD. To date, this institution, established only in 2024, has become one of the few globally holding shares in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI simultaneously.
It is worth mentioning that, with its portfolio of quality AI assets, MGX has also won the trust of investors. On July 1, MGX's initial fund closed at 49 billion USD, exceeding the original goal of 45 billion USD, making it the largest specialized AI fund in history.
Apart from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the other Gulf countries have relatively smaller funding sizes. While they do not have the "shopping" capability, they have each carved out their own ecological niche.
For instance, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) established the national AI company Qai at the end of last year and subsequently signed a 20 billion USD joint venture platform with Brookfield, focusing on AI infrastructure; the Kuwait Investment Authority has also completed its layout by being an LP in neighboring AI funds: it is a funder of the Brookfield AI fund and also one of the funders of AI Infrastructure Partners—this platform involves MGX, BlackRock, GIP, Microsoft, and others, aims to raise 30 billion USD for data centers and AI computing power.
In summary, while these countries have different paths, their collective actions form a complete AI value chain—from building underlying computing power and data centers to establishing AI companies and fund platforms, and then to acquiring equity in model companies, the positions that should be at the table have basically been filled by the Middle East.
The “Middle Eastern buyers” behind Zhihua and MiniMax
In the "shopping" list of Middle Eastern capital, China is also an unavoidable stop, and equity investments in AI companies are the most direct way for them to enter China.
The most typical example is the Prosperity7 fund under the oil giant Saudi Aramco.
In mid-2024, Prosperity7 led the C round financing of Zhihua, with a post-investment valuation of approximately 3 billion USD, making the company the first domestic model unicorn to break through a valuation of 20 billion yuan and marking the first investment from Middle Eastern capital obtained by a Chinese large model company.
With Zhihua's successful listing on the secondary market, this investment also ushered in a harvest period. The prospectus shows that Prosperity7's actual investment amount at that time was 213 million yuan, holding about 1.2%. Based on the market cap of 360.8 billion HKD at the close on September 17, the value has reached 4.3 billion HKD (approximately 3.7 billion yuan), realizing an unrealized gain of nearly 3.5 billion yuan.
In addition to Zhihua, there are a series of names in Prosperity7’s Chinese AI landscape: vector database Zilliz, optoelectronic hybrid computing chip company Xizhi Technology, and AI pharmaceutical platform Yingsi Technology, covering key links in both the infrastructure and model layers.
What’s even more noteworthy is its early layout in the application layer. As early as 2022, when embodied intelligence had not yet gained widespread recognition, Prosperity7 invested in Jacka Robotics and Fourier Intelligence; in the past two years, it has successively invested in Qianxun Intelligence, Qiongche Intelligence, and Digua Robotics. To date, Prosperity7's layout in China's AI field has covered upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, including infrastructure, model layers, and application layers.
Behind MiniMax, which went public at the same time as Zhihua, Middle Eastern capital can also be found. During the company’s IPO, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) participated with 65 million USD as cornerstone investment, being one of the institutions with the highest subscription amounts among 14 cornerstone investors.
In addition to the above cases, UAE's Leishi Capital led a 20 million RMB Pre-A round for Shenzhen Zhongqing Robotics and continued to increase its holdings in subsequent rounds; Abu Dhabi Capital Group (ADCG) signed a joint venture agreement with Xiaoku Technology, providing royal relationship networks, land reserves, and government project access resources.
Beyond direct investment, Middle Eastern capital is increasingly appearing as LPs in the funding lists of Chinese VC funds.
In May this year, Abu Dhabi's Arab Gulf Investment Group and Yinggang Capital announced the establishment of a global investment fund with an initial scale of 500 million USD, reportedly aiming primarily at Pre-IPO, IPO, and PIPE investment opportunities in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Following that in July, Qatar's venture capital company Rawdat Capital announced it had signed an exclusive joint investment cooperation agreement with Innovation Works, gaining priority co-investment rights for high-quality projects and jointly incubating AI startups; at the same time, it signed a cooperation agreement with Zero One Everything to promote the latter's large model solution in the Gulf region.
This is undoubtedly a positive signal. In recent years, Middle Eastern capital has remained the focus of attention in the domestic primary market, especially in 2023, which has been hindered by fundraising, investment, and exit obstacles, leading to a craze of “going to the Middle East to mine gold,” but amidst the excitement, the number of GPs actually securing Middle Eastern money is few.
Now that investment direction has shifted from new energy to the AI market, which it is not entirely familiar with but must participate in, the situation may experience some loosening.
A structural transformation concerning “national destiny”
To some extent, the collective financial investments of Middle Eastern countries in AI stem from an enduring anxiety about survival.
Rewinding to April 25, 2016, the Saudi cabinet approved a national transformation plan called "Saudi Vision 2030," led by Mohammed bin Salman. At that time, the situation facing him was not glamorous: international oil prices had just recovered from the sharp drop in 2014, while Saudi Arabia's fiscal revenue had long been heavily reliant on the oil well below the ground.
This document includes a repeatedly cited self-description—Saudi Arabia aims to quit its “oil addiction.” The paths outlined are also quite clear: before the oil runs out, the country's economic structure must be changed, with several levers for transformation, among which AI is placed at the forefront.
Not long after, faced with similar transformation pressures, the UAE, Qatar, Oman, and others also launched their national strategies, listing AI development as the economic foundation for the post-oil era. Their targets are notably ambitious: Saudi Arabia aims to let AI contribute over 12% of GDP by 2030; the UAE's 2031 strategy sets a goal for AI to contribute 40% of GDP; Oman’s “Vision 2040” aims to raise the digital economy's contribution to GDP from 2% in 2021 to 10%…
Of course, these goals are not just whims. Along with significant funding, the Middle East does possess unique advantages in terms of energy, land, and geographical location.
It is well known that AI data centers are energy-intensive, with a high proportion of electricity in reasoning costs, meaning that whoever gets the cheapest electricity can sell tokens at a lower price. A comparable data point is that the Saudi Al Shuaibah solar project has a power generation cost of less than 1 cent/kWh, about one-twentieth of the UK Hinkley Point C nuclear project's cost; the industrial electricity prices in the Gulf are about 0.05 to 0.07 USD/kWh, which is one-fifth to one-seventh of the UK’s.
Meanwhile, the vast deserts with sparse populations are very suitable for expanding and constructing large-scale data centers, and the six Gulf countries are located at the intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe, making them important hubs for global submarine cables, naturally possessing network advantages to connect major global markets.
Jiang Tianjiao, a researcher at Fudan University’s Global AI Innovation Governance Center, once pointed out in a media interview: “From a technical perspective, the current AI-driven technological revolution is independent of the previously established industrial revolution, allowing Gulf countries, which lack a manufacturing base and have missed the internet wave, to ‘parachute in’ and become new global technology highlands, even becoming important nodes connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa.”
Of course, beyond these advantages, the shortcomings in developing AI in the Middle East are also quite evident: the staggering water consumption for data center cooling, geopolitical constraints on chip acquisition, and insufficient local talent reserves—none of these issues can be instantly resolved merely with money. And this precisely provides several avenues for cooperation with China:
First, model bases and localization. HUMAIN M3 is based on MiniMax M3, which is a clear signal—self-developed large models in the Middle East are costly and time-consuming, and Chinese open-source models can serve as a foundation, which the Middle East can then adapt using local language, culture, and data for further training.
Secondly, computing power infrastructure supply chain. The Middle East has electricity, land, and capital, but the construction of data centers, servers, liquid cooling, optical modules, energy storage, photovoltaics, and power grids relies on a supply chain that China possesses most comprehensively.
Third, applications in robotics. The Middle East has significant digitization demands in finance, governance, energy, healthcare, and education, while China's AI applications and embodied intelligence already have cost and engineering advantages. Simultaneously, Chinese companies can also leverage Middle Eastern capital and scenarios to achieve local deployment.
Currently, the Middle East is using money earned from oil to buy a ticket to enter the AI era. China may not be the sole seller of this ticket, but it is likely to be one of the most important co-builders.
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