UAE welcomes Trump amid anticipation of AI chip deals with U.S.

In the final leg of his tour through the Gulf’s royal palaces, U.S. President Donald Trump landed in Abu Dhabi on Thursday as G42 and other UAE tech firms awaited a green light for billions of dollars in advanced chip deals.

UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed greeted the U.S. leader at Abu Dhabi’s exclusive Presidential Terminal after a brief flight on Air Force One from neighboring Qatar. Also on hand to welcome Trump were the President’s brothers, Vice President and National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, who is Chairman of G42, and Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed.

Earlier in the day, Qatar hosted a business conference with Trump in the capital city of Doha and the president talked talked to U.S. soldiers at the Al Udeid U.S. Air Base, which has been an anchor for America’s security alliance in the Gulf.

The U.S. leader woke up in Doha after Emir Sheikh Tamim hosted a lavish state dinner at Lusail Palace on Wednesday night. On Trump’s arrival in Qatar, his motorcade passed sword dancers, parading camels and a royal honor guard mounted on Arabian stallions.

Today’s visit to the UAE is the last stop in his regional tour, which started on Tuesday when he landed in Riyadh and wraps up with Friday’s return to Washington.

Trump and close adviser Elon Musk spent two days in Saudi Arabia, hosted by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and holding chats with corporate leaders from such powerhouses as Aramco, the Public Investment Fund, Nvidia, OpenAI, BlackRock and Citigroup.

In Abu Dhabi, where main roads are decked out with neon signs welcoming Trump, the president was expected to announce a preliminary agreement to let the UAE import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips per year, starting in 2025, boosting the Emirates’ construction of data centers required for the highest level of AI development, Reuters reports.

Twenty percent of the chips will be allocated to UAE tech firm G42, and the remainder will be allocated to U.S. companies like Microsoft and Oracle that are building data centers in the UAE. The deal could potentially extend through 2027 or even 2030, according to the news agency.

The White House said Trump secured deals totaling more than $243 billion with Qatar after leaders from the Gulf peninsula state pledged some $1.2 trillion in American investment. The UAE has committed to investing $1.4 trillion in the U.S. over the next 10 years, while Saudi Arabia said it hopes to reach $1 trillion during Trump’s four-year term.

Among the largest deals was Qatar’s $96 billion plan to acquire as many as 210 Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft. The U.S. and Qatari governments also signed off on a $1 billion agreement for Raytheon to provide counter-drone capabilities to Qatar. General Atomics also secured a nearly $2 billion agreement for Qatar to acquire MQ-9B drones.

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman, meanwhile, defended his country’s offer to Trump of a luxury jet to replace the 40-year-old Air Force One, telling CNN it was not an influence-buying effort.

“It is government to government. The transaction has nothing to do with personnel, whether it’s on the U.S. side or on the Qatari side,” he said, adding that Qatar is ready to withdraw the plan if it’s found to be illegal.

Trump moves on to Qatar after bounty of deals in Saudi Arabia

U.S. President Donald Trump took his Middle East dealmaking tour to Qatar today after a summit meeting in Riyadh with leaders of the six Gulf states that focused in part on promoting more investment in American military hardware and artificial intelligence.

The visit to Qatar’s capital of Doha continued to generate criticism from Democrats in Congress over Trump’s intention to accept a gift from the Qatari government of a refurbished $400 million plane that would temporarily replace Air Force One.

Arriving in the early afternoon after a short flight from Saudi Arabia, Trump landed at Hamad International Airport in Doha and was met by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim, who was waiting on a yellow carpet to symbolize the desert peninsula’s sandy terrain.

Tomorrow, the President will meet Qatari business leaders for breakfast and greet U.S. soldiers at the Al Udeid U.S. Air Base, before taking off for the UAE.

In his two-day visit to Riyadh, Trump lavished attention on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who said he would try to meet the President’s challenge for investing $1 trillion in the U.S. over the next four years.

At a Saudi-U.S. business conference in Riyadh, Trump and MBS held court with a constellation of billionaires, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio.

From the Saudi business world, the conference featured Muhammad Al Jasser, Chairman of Islamic Development Bank; Nabeel Koshak, CEO of Saudi Venture Capital; Marc Winterhoff, Interim CEO of Lucid; John Pagano, Group CEO of Red Sea Global; Mohammad Abunayyan, Chairman of ACWA Power; Tony Douglas, CEO of Riyadh Air; and Jerry Inzerillo, Group CEO of Diriyah Co.

The Saudi Crown Prince wrapped up the day by bringing Trump for a tour of Diriyah, the ancestral home of the Al Saud royal family, which was led by Inzerillo. The site is undergoing a massive renovation as one of the multibillion megaprojects undertaken by the kingdom, along with the 100-mile long Neom city on the kingdom’s west coast and the Al Mukkab skyscraper cube in Riyadh.

Among the biggest issues discussed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday was the extent to which the Trump administration would lift sanctions on AI semiconductor chips that are being eagerly sought by the Gulf states.

Nvidia, the world’s biggest semiconductor maker, agreed to supply its most advanced AI chips to Saudi Arabia’s Humain, a company created to push that country’s AI infrastructure efforts, Bloomberg reports. Humain will get “several hundred thousand” of Nvidia’s most advanced processors over the next five years, starting with 18,000 of its cutting-edge GB300 Grace Blackwell products and its InfiniBand networking technology.

Huang saw his personal net worth surge to approximately $120 billion over the day, up from $80 billion a year ago, driven by soaring demand for the company’s AI chips that has fueled a sharp rise in its stock, Reuters reports.

AMD, Nvidia’s nearest rival in AI accelerators, will provide chips and software for data centers “stretching from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the United States” in a $10 billion project, Humain and AMD said.

Also, Saudi VC firm STV launched a $100 million AI fund backed by Google to invest in MENA startups, as part of a broader set of tech-focused U.S.-Saudi agreements announced during President Trump’s visit to Riyadh, Bloomberg reports. And Saudi Arabia agreed to authorize the use of Musk’s Starlink service for aviation and maritime shipping, the SpaceX founder announced.

MBS tells Trump in Riyadh he’ll try to invest $1 trillion in U.S.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told President Donald Trump and a solid portion of the world’s business elite on Tuesday that he hopes to fulfill his pledge to invest $600 billion in the U.S. and might even hit the $1 trillion mark sought by the White House.

In turn, Trump praised MBS as a visionary leader and hailed the U.S.-Saudi alliance as a profitable enterprise for both sides as the two spoke at a business conference in Riyadh and the president kicked off a four-day swing through the Gulf that will also take him to Qatar and the UAE.

“Today we hope for investment opportunities worth $600 billion, including deals worth $300 billion that were signed during this forum,” the Saudi leader said in a speech at the capital city’s King Abdulaziz International Conference Center. “We will work in the coming months on the second phase to complete deals and raise it to $1 trillion,” he said.

A good chunk of that commitment will come from an agreement to sell Saudi Arabia an arms package worth nearly $142 billion, which the White House called “the largest defense cooperation agreement” that the U.S. has ever signed.

Trump beamed as he followed MBS onstage to address an audience that included Tesla founder Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, Saudi Public Investment Fund Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan and hundreds of other corporate leaders, investors and government officials from the two countries.

The President thanked MBS for setting the $1 trillion goal and talked for close to an hour about his affection for the kingdom, ticking off several of the deals signed by the two countries during the day.

“So, number one, I like visiting with you, and we’ve known each other very well, and I really believe we like each other a lot and, number two, for the United States, we’ve brought tremendous investment in and tremendous jobs, and we continue to service your great country very well,” Trump said.

The U.S. leader also said he maintains a “fervent hope” that Saudi Arabia will join the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel, as the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco did in 2020, though he added, “you’ll do it in your own time.”

Earlier in the day, the Saudi Crown Prince took the unusual step of greeting Trump in person when the president landed on a flight from Washington at King Khalid International Airport outside Riyadh.

Unlike former President Joe Biden’s tense visit and cautious fist bump in 2022, MBS stood on the tarmac and patiently watched Trump descend from Air Force One onto a royal purple carpet. The two shook hands and Trump gave the prince a warm shoulder tap before they strode together to the waiting motorcade.

The greeting underlined the intentions on both sides to make Trump’s first regional trip in his second term a public success and broadcast the closeness of the U.S.-Saudi alliance.

Inside the Al-Yamamah Palace where a lavish reception and lunch were held, both leaders were accompanied by top Cabinet ministers and a roster of business leaders, with Trump’s entourage including Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Conversations at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum – held at the same site beside the marble-lined Ritz-Carlton Hotel as the annual Future Investment Initiative conference – were focused on concrete dealmaking and illustrated the seriousness in both countries to make the most of the rare event, said Tally Zingher, Managing Director of the U.S.-headquartered boutique advisory firm Blue Laurel.

“Being here allows me to listen and observe firsthand how the Saudis are articulating their priorities and how those priorities have already manifested into concrete opportunities for U.S. companies,” Zingher told The Circuit.

Among the headliners addressing the conference were Khalid Bin Abdulaziz Al-Falih, Minister of Investment; Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Minister of Finance; Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Minister of Energy; Bandar Alkhorayef, Minister of Industry and Minerals and Faisal Alibrahim, Minister of Economy & Planning.

The U.S. delegation was headed by Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury; Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce; and David Sacks, the White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto.

From the Saudi business world, the conference featured Muhammad Al Jasser, Chairman, Islamic Development Bank; Nabeel Koshak, CEO of Saudi Venture Capital; Marc Winterhoff, Interim CEO of Lucid; John Pagano, Group CEO of Red Sea Global; Mohammad Abunayyan, Chairman of ACWA Power; Tony Douglas, CEO of Riyadh Air and Jerry Inzerillo, Group CEO of Diriyah Co.

U.S. financiers at the forum included Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Franklin Templeton’s Jenny Johnson, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, LionTree’s Aryeh Bourkoff and BDT & MSD Partners’ Dina Powell McCormick.

From the U.S. tech industry, Palantir’s Alex Karp joined the forum as well as Alphabet/Google’s Ruth Porat, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon.

With planemakers and defense contractors set to reap billions in Saudi deals, the conference featured Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, Lockheed Martin’s Michael Williamson, Honeywell’s Ken West and Halliburton’s Jeff Miller.

Among other speakers at the summit, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is a perennial fixture at the FII conference and hosted a spinoff conference in his city last February, where Trump spoke. Also appearing was Gianni Infantino, President of world soccer’s governing FIFA organization, after Saudi Arabia was picked to host the 2034 World Cup.

BlackRock joins Abu Dhabi’s IHC in $1 billion reinsurance venture

Wall Street titan BlackRock is teaming up with Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Co. to create a $1 billion reinsurance firm with its foundations in AI.

The venture announced Thursday is one of a cavalcade of deals that are being cooked up amid Trump’s tour of the Gulf next week, which will take him to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, followed by Qatar and the UAE.

BlackRock, the world’s largest alternative investment firm, and Abu Dhabi asset manager Lunate will join as minority partners, according to a statement issued by IHC.

The new company will be chaired by Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and Chairman of ADNOC. Mark Wilson, the former chief executive of Aviva and AIA Group, will serve as CEO.

Lunate, which was founded two years ago and manages $110 billion, will provide expertise in private and public markets to the reinsurance company, which will operate from the capital city’s free zone financial center, ADGM.

Also in the run-up to the Trump visit, the U.S. is developing a fast-track process for screening foreign investments, which could smooth the process for sovereign wealth funds such as the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the UAE’s Mubadala, and the Qatar Investment Authority to sign contracts next week, Bloomberg reports.

Trump’s Saudi trip will also draw CEOs from BlackRock, Palantir

Some of America’s top corporate executives, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser and Palantir’s Alex Karp, will be following U.S. President Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia next week.

The three business leaders are scheduled to speak at the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum in Riyadh that is being put together to coincide with Trump’s arrival in the kingdom on May 13, when he kicks off a tour of the Gulf that will also take him to Qatar and the UAE.

Other U.S. executives slated to appear are Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, Franklin Templeton’s Jenny Johnson, Alphabet’s Ruth Porat, IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon.

Trump, who will meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman when he arrives in Riyadh, said he anticipates completing major arms deals in the kingdom and will seek to obtain a Saudi commitment to invest as much as $1 trillion in the U.S. The Crown Prince offered $600 billion.

The business event will take place at the vast King Abdulaziz International Conference Center in the capital city’s diplomatic quarter, where the annual Future Investment Initiative gathering is held, alongside the luxurious Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The event is being sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, along with Aramco, Maaden and other state-owned companies.

Greeting participants in the conference will be top Saudi Cabinet members, including Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Minister of Energy; Khalid Al-Falih, the Minister of Investment; Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Minister of Finance; Bandar Alkhorayef, Minister of Industry and Mineral Resources; and Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco.

Eric Trump returns to UAE to pitch crypto at Dubai conference

Eric Trump, who drew enthusiastic hoots and hollers in Abu Dhabi last December when he told the Bitcoin MENA conference that his dad would unleash the power of cryptocurrencies, returns to the UAE this week to kick off Dubai’s TOKEN2049 summit.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s 41-year-old second son promises to deliver another rousing address at the gathering, which starts on Wednesday, as crypto fever builds with the imminent issue of the UAE’s own dirham-denominated stablecoin.

ADQ, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, together with First Abu Dhabi Bank and International Holding Co., announced on Monday that the digital currency will be fully regulated by the Central Bank of the UAE to build investor confidence and lessen the uncertainty inherent to bitcoins and other blockchain-based money. No date was given for the UAE coin’s debut.

“The launch of the stablecoin marks a pivotal step in our commitment to strengthening the UAE’s digital infrastructure ecosystem,” said Mohamed Hassan Alsuwaidi, Managing Director and Group CEO of ADQ.

“As we move forward towards an increasingly digital and connected economy, the stablecoin will provide a solution that is secure, efficient and scalable, while creating new opportunities for growth and value creation,” he said.

Alongside Trump, the two-day TOKEN2049 event will draw top names in the crypto industry, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao; OKX founder and CEO Star Xu; Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets; and Mathew McDermott, Head of Digital Assets for Goldman Sachs.

Microsoft bet on ‘edge’ computing brings AI closer to Mideast users

Microsoft, which invested $1.5 billion last year in Abu Dhabi’s G42 artificial intelligence firm, is rolling out new AI products tailored to customers across the Middle East and Africa.

Overseeing the campaign is Chris Papaphotis, who was in the UAE this week to launch the company’s Copilot+ series of Surface PCs, which integrate so-called “edge” AI technology that runs on users’ computers rather than on distant cloud-based servers.

“AI gets born in the cloud, but it will be used in the edge,” Papaphotis said in an interview with The Circuit.

The new PCs have been adapted to the region’s business and government market with bolstered Arabic-language capacities, said Papaphotis, 53, who started with Microsoft almost 30 years ago in his native Greece. Now he covers 109 countries as Senior Director for Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa of Device Partner Sales.

Microsoft, the world’s second-largest company after Apple, plans to invest approximately $80 billion globally this year in AI-enabled data centers, which include facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and South Africa.

The firm is also a co-investor with BlackRock and Abu Dhabi’s MGX in the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, which launched last September with the goal of raising $100 billion in private equity capital.

The interview with Papaphotis has been edited for length and clarity.

Where are Microsoft’s investments concentrated now in the Middle East and Africa region?

Both in the cloud and on the edge. It’s an area that we are interested in. As you know, we have strategic relationships with G42, for example, significant investments from Microsoft as well, as well as investing in data centers across the region — Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and so forth. It is something that Microsoft invests heavily in. We know that the Middle East and Africa are opportunities for us. It’s great to see the governments being so interested because they understand that this is a kind of technology that, by investing now, you can leapfrog and shape the future. For example, creating Arabic LLMs (large language models), is really a keystone for that.

Why is edge AI becoming so important to the company?

Today, AI is a technology that was born in the cloud. It means that there was a lot of data and what we call the large language models that have been compiled through very huge data centers. We all know about the big investments in this area. Currently, a lot of people experience AI through this lens, meaning that you go, let’s say, to ChatGPT or Co-Pilot, and you ask a question, then it goes up in the cloud, and it crunches it. However, people understand that as we move along, AI will become much more of a personal assistant. And in order to really unlock the value that it can bring to you, it needs to have access to personal details. For reasons of privacy and security, it makes a lot of sense to actually have it on the edge. So maybe it’s a long-winded answer saying that AI gets born in the cloud, but will be used in the edge. And a lot of computing needs to exist in the edge to be able to do this for you and become very personalized and to suit your needs.

Q: What are the biggest opportunities and challenges you see for combining cloud and edge?

The truth of the matter is that there is really a generational shift in technology. AI is here to stay. It’s not like something that is just a fad. It will truly ingrain every single thing we do in our lives, from self-driving cars to AI agents, that we will be able to command and have tens or hundreds of them for personal or work tasks to enhance human productivity. I think we’ll look back in history and say this is great. Of course, it does take a responsible way to use it. It still has some limitations – for example, hallucinations and producing results that are not accurate. It’s important for us to understand how to use it properly to our benefit and understand the limitations so that we can sidestep them and have them under control. That’s why in Microsoft, we call them Co-Pilot. We feel that humans should always be pilots, and then there should be co-pilots next to us, giving us assistance, but we should always maintain control.

How has the experience of working for Microsoft changed over your three decades with the company?

I mean, it’s crazy. Honestly, I feel that it’s like working for a startup, although I have been working for so many years. And the reason is that in a startup, you have the sense of possibilities of something new that the whole world can actually see. If you think about it, we started with a vision of having one PC on every desk, and now it’s one AI per person across the world or even multiple ones depending on the different roles that you have. I think we’re just in the very beginning. Things have evolved tremendously, and to be quite honest, it’s part of the excitement that we don’t know where it’s going to lead us, but for sure there are going to be infinite possibilities.

Musk’s xAI, Nvidia join with MGX in artificial intelligence fund

The UAE’s biggest tech firms are capitalizing on White House support to tighten partnerships with America’s leaders in the booming industry of artificial intelligence.

A consortium created last year by Abu Dhabi investment fund MGX, Microsoft and BlackRock to finance power-hungry AI data centers welcomed chipmaker Nvidia and Elon Musk’s xAI to the group on Wednesday.

Expansion of the top-level venture came amid the Washington visit by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE National Security Advisor and Chairman of MGX and a constellation of other tech companies, who dined at the White House this week with President Donald Trump.

Sheikh Tahnoon, who held a meeting with Musk through a video feed on Wednesday, has been accompanied through the trip by Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the MGX Vice Chairman and CEO of the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund. Also on the visit is Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the ADNOC national oil company and the UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology. Peng Xiao, CEO of the Abu Dhabi-based AI company G42, joined the call with Musk.

Among the other meetings in his U.S. rounds, Sheikh Tahnoon said he “explored opportunities for collaboration and investment” with Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

ADQ, meanwhile, another Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, agreed to invest a combined $5 billion in a partnership with U.S-based Energy Capital Partners to build power stations for data centers and AI projects – with the investment eventually reaching $25 billion.

The announcement came as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, Calif., that the industry is preparing for a massive leap in building data centers and chip manufacturing plants with accompanying energy demand.

“Over the next several years, we’re going to be building giant AI factories,” he said. Not normal AI factories … ones you see from space,” Huang said.

Abu Dhabi’s Multiply eyes $1B divestment from PAL Cooling

Abu Dhabi’s Multiply Group may be getting ready to divest from its PAL Cooling unit, which keeps the UAE capital’s skyscrapers at tolerable temperatures under the Gulf’s sizzling sun.

The firm, a unit of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed’s International Holding Co., could raise as much as $1 billion if it’s put up for sale, Bloomberg reports.

PAL’S cooling technology involves pumping chilled water into buildings from centralized plants.

Multiply is working with Standard Chartered on the sale, which is at an early stage and has drawn interest from both regional and international investors, the news agency said.

Multiply went public more than three years ago and has investments in companies ranging from Getty Images to Rihanna’s lingerie company.

The Weekly Circuit: HSBC reaps Mideast deal fees + KSA hires BlackRock

👋 Hello from the Middle East!

In the Weekly Circuit today, we’re looking at Saudi Arabia’s hiring BlackRock to help develop a mortgage-backed securities market, Mubadala-owned Sanad’s $408 million engine sale to Etihad Airways and the IMF’s latest forecast for Middle East economic growth. But first, HSBC tops Standard Chartered in investment banking fees and a Circuit interview with Nuwa Capital’s Khaled Talhouni.

A jump in dealmaking across the Middle Eastand North Africa has generated an estimated $1 billion in investment banking fees so far this year – a 27% boost over the first nine months of 2023, with HSBC leading the pack.

London-based HSBC earned $80.4 million in fees during the first three quarters of 2024, or 7.8% of the total investment banking pool, Zawya reports, citing LSEG Deals Intelligence.

Coming second in the banking field’s league tables was Standard Chartered with $56.5 million in fees, followed by First Abu Dhabi Bank with $56 million. The highest amount of investment banking fees were generated from Saudi Arabia ($470.7 million), followed by the UAE ($395.9 million), Qatar ($45 million), Kuwait ($41.7 million) and Egypt ($25.1 million).

The largest deal in the MENA region during the first nine months of 2024 was ADNOC’s $14.8 billion takeover offer for German chemicals company Covestro, according to the LSEG data. The largest during the third quarter was UAE clean energy firm Masdar’s offer to buy Spain’s Saeta Yield from Brookfield Renewable for $1.4 billion.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is pouring money into health care with a new emphasis on showcasing the integration of artificial intelligence by its hospitals and growing pharmaceutical industry.

Speaking at the Global Health Exhibition in Riyadh this week, Saudi Health Minister Fahad Al-Jalajel announced investment deals worth more than $13 billion.

“Our goal is for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to serve as a hub for addressing global challenges by establishing a unified government approach, focusing on innovation, digital solutions and artificial intelligence,” Al-Jalajel said at the conference.

CIRCUIT INTERVIEW

Nuwa Capital navigates evolving Middle East VC investment landscape

Khaled Talhouni, Managing Partner of Nuwa Capital, says the recent proliferation of tech IPOs in the Gulf demonstrates that a “window is opening” for investors on stock exchanges in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and their neighbors, The Circuit’s Omnia Al Desoukie reports.

Talhouni, 39, has a broad view of developments in regional finance having opened offices in both Dubai and Riyadh for the venture capital firm, which manages $100 million in assets.

Nuwa’s backers include Saudi Arabia’s Al Faisaliah Group, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Co., Jada Fund of Funds and the Dubai Future District Fund. Among its portfolio companies are Calo, a Bahrain-based meal planning start-up; Zest Equity, an online platform for managing venture capital investments; and Raqamyah, a Saudi crowdfunding platform.

Click here to read the full interview.

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GITEX was a whirlwind – What should I be doing now to follow up

GITEX was a behemoth conference that welcomed 6,000 delegates and over 100,000 visitors to Dubai last week.

Being part of it was a whirlwind of innovation, tech insights, and networking, but the real magic happens after the event – when you follow up, Brittany McDonough writes in her column for The Circuit.

If you’re wondering how to turn those GITEX connections into new opportunities, here’s a quick guide on best practices after you come home.

Click here to read the full article.

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