UAE minister woos Silicon Valley investment firms on U.S. tour

From meeting U.S. policymakers face-to-face in Washington to chatting with OpenAI execs in San Francisco, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Trade and Talent Attraction Thani Al Zeyoudi says his cross-country tour last week should pay dividends in relationship-building abroad.

Along with a raft of discussions about artificial intelligence “as the defining technology of our era,” Al Zeyoudi’s Silicon Valley sojourn put him in direct contact with a wide gamut of Silicon Valley investment firms, he said on Tuesday in a LinkedIn post.

Those included TPG, Thoma Bravo, Viking Global Investors, Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, Brave Capital, Audere Capital, Flagship Capital Management, General Catalyst and Mubadala Ventures – which the minister called “sources of capital formation being directed to bleeding-edge technologies shaping the world today.”

He said companies including Flexport, Interos, Lightmatter and Lila Sciences were “keen to explore partnerships with the UAE.”

Reflecting on the SelectUSA Investment Summit in suburban Washington D.C., where he was a keynote speaker, Al Zeyoudi noted his meetings with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy as especially useful in kindling American-Emirati collaboration.

“While we shared non-oil trade of $40 billion in 2023, I believe our nations have only touched the surface of bilateral opportunity,” Al Zeyoudi said. “Sectors such as renewable energy, sustainability, biotechnology, life sciences, finance, and logistics are all ripe for further development.”

Abu Dhabi’s AI-focused energy company AIQ, meanwhile, announced a partnership agreement on Monday with Texas-based Halliburton’s Landmark unit to help expand the use of AI tools in oil and gas production.