Mubadala poured money into AI because it saw problems to fix

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala sovereign wealth fund invested billions in artificial intelligence because it recognized early that the difficulties of building power-hungry AI networks could turn into big profits down the line, Deputy Group CEO Waleed Al Mokarrab Al Muhair said.

“We wanted to get involved, really at the AI infrastructure level,” Al Muhair said in a panel discussion on Monday at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif.

“We wanted to help be an enabler, because we identified… that there were going to be energy constraints, there were going to be transmission constraints, data center capacity constraints, in order to enable what we think is going to be revolutionary from a global perspective,” he said.

Mubadala joined with the Abu Dhabi-based G42 artificial intelligence firm in March to launch MGX, an investment fund that expects to raise $100 billion to support AI technology development. Over the past year, the sovereign fund has co-invested in AI ventures with Microsoft, OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI and Anthropic.

Al Muhair spoke on a panel about Global Capital Markets with Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, Carlyle’s Harvey Schwartz, Prudential’s Andrew Sullivan and Franklin Templeton’s Jenny Johnson. Other Mubadala executives at the Milken conference this week include Khaled Al Marri, CEO of Real Assets; and Mohamed Albadr, Head of Asia within the Direct Investments platform.

“We wouldn’t have put as much capital as we have into MGX and into AI if we didn’t think that this was going to be a long-term trend that was going to help kind of fuel growth, globally speaking,” Al Muhair said.