A rally this year on the Shanghai Stock Exchange has been a boon to Saudi Arabia.

The Public Investment Fund bought 153,000 shares in Alibaba during the first quarter of 2024, profiting from the stock’s 24% jump during the period, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports, citing disclosures by the PIF to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

By contrast, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund reduced its portfolio of U.S. stocks by about half to $18 billion.

“Investors have relinquished the wait-and-watch approach [for Chinese equities] in favor of building exposure on incremental signs of easing and wiped out the underweight allocation from prior months,” Bank of America strategists said in a note on Thursday, cited by the newspaper.

The MSCI China Index has surged nearly 28% since a January low, restoring over $2 trillion of value to Chinese companies listed on the mainland, in Hong Kong and New York, according to Bloomberg data. 

Mubadala Investment Co., Abu Dhabi’s second-largest sovereign wealth fund, published its 2023 annual review today, revealing the fund has swelled to $302 billion in assets under management and deployed $27 billion over the year.

Those investments were focused on opportunities in artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure, life sciences and the energy transition as well as expanding its holdings in private credit, according to a statement.

“Amidst the complexities that defined the global investment landscape in 2023, Mubadala accelerated its shift towards targeted investments that will shape the future economy” of the UAE, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, Managing Director and Group CEO, said in a statement.

Mubadala reported $27 billion in investment returns, a 19.5% decline from the market peak in 2021 and down 6.6% compared to 2022. The portfolio achieved a five-year rate of return of 10.3%.

Qatar expects demand for liquified natural gas to keep growing and sees little prospect of a growing glut in coming years.

Speaking at the Qatar Investment Forum in Doha on Wednesday, Energy Minister Saad Al-Kaabi said his country will press on with its multibillion-dollar expansion of liquified natural gas facilities, and may consider adding further capacity if more gas becomes available, Bloomberg reports.

“If we have a reasonable economic growth going forward, I think you’ll see all that supply and demand will catch up and you’ll need another phase of development of gas in the 2030s,” he said. “I don’t think gas is going away anytime soon.”

Qatar is boosting its LNG capacity to 126 million tons a year by 2027 from 77 million a year currently. It’s targeting 142 million tons a year by the end of the decade.

In a bid to rouse would-be expats from their roosts in London, New York and Singapore, Dubai has created a new office dedicated to improving the quality of life in the Middle East’s wealthiest city.

The plan tracks with a growing trend among Gulf economies to prioritize investments in livability as competition for knowledge workers – financiers, tech engineers and healthcare workforces – heats up. Populations are on the rise in cities across the region including Dubai, as well as Abu Dhabi, Doha and Riyadh.  

Under directives from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, and Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai, the Dubai Quality of Life Strategy 2033 was approved on Tuesday with the aim of turning Dubai “into the world’s best city to live in.” 

Encompassing 200 projects and 1,000 live events aimed at drawing stars and sports teams, Dubai will also focus urban plans on residents’ ability to access essential services within a 20-minute journey — a distinction cities like Paris take pride in.

The plans will rely heavily on private sector participation, according to a statement.

Riyadh is undergoing a similar effort, pouring billions of dollars into beautifying the kingdom’s capital with parks, refurbished boulevards and new culture and leisure spaces as society opens up in the long-conservative kingdom.

Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament ignited tourism in 2022 and officials say they hope to stoke the industry further through deregulation.

By changing rules on licensing and operating hours, the Gulf state expects to generate a new bounty of international visitors, Saad bin Ali Al Kharji, Chairman of Qatar Tourism told Bloomberg in an interview.

“We will try to liberate the hospitality sector and remove any obstacles,” he said.

Defying expectations of a downturn following the World Cup, incoming arrivals to Qatar swelled 39% to 4 million tourists last year from 2022.

Qatar’s strategic plan calls for tourism to contribute 12% to GDP as Gulf neighbors Saudi Arabia and the UAE also invest heavily in the industry.

The Gulf Cooperation Council plans to offer a regional visa soon that would grant tourists access to all six of its member nations.

Abu Dhabi’s leading artificial intelligence firms made two announcements about advancements in large language model-based products this week.

Core42, a subsidiary of Mubadala and Microsoft-backed G42, has rolled out JAIS Chat as a mobile app available for download on iOS.

The bilingual chatbot was developed to meet the growing demand and popularity of generative AI capabilities regionally and can interact in English and Arabic, as well as facilitate translation.

Meanwhile, the Technology Innovation Institute, a government-backed research center, launched an update to its LLM, Falcon 2, that it says can outperform big tech players like Meta’s Llama.

“We’re very proud that we can still punch way above our weight, really compete with the best players globally,” Advanced Technology Research Council Secretary General Faisal Al Bannai, who is also an adviser to the president on strategic research and advanced technology, said.  

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani opened the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha this morning with the message that the country is continuing its economic diversification efforts driven by its sovereign wealth fund, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).

QIA, which has over a half trillion dollars in assets under management, has made the U.S. its main market but it is eyeing emerging markets like Central Asia and Africa, he said, and the fund is accelerating investments in technology. 

His remarks at the Bloomberg-hosted forum follow an announcement from the QIA last night that it plans to be an anchor investor in Ardian Semiconductor, a fund set up by French private equity firm Ardian to invest in the semiconductor industry across Europe. 

No deal terms were disclosed but the move comes as Gulf sovereigns are jockeying for key pieces of what is powering the AI revolution, including chips, data centers and intellectual property.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund launched the $100 billion AI investment firm Alat in February and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala followed up a month later as a founding partner of MGX, a deep tech-focused fund aiming for $100 billion in assets under management. 

The three-day conference will feature Jenny Johnson, President & CEO of Franklin Templeton (who addressed the Abu Dhabi Global Healthcare Week yesterday), and Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel.

Also joining panels in Qatar’s capital will be Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil; Noor Sweid, Founder and Managing Partner of UAE-based Global Ventures; Rick Gerson, Co-Founder and Chair of Alpha Wave; and Gerry Cardinale, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Redbird Capital Partners.

The Gulf is open for business — and on the move. That was the message from key Middle East players attending the Milken Institute Global Conference this week at the Beverly Hilton. 

The Circuit offers a roundup of newsmaking moments and soundbites from the annual gathering of the world’s financial elite. 

Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih issued a broad invitation for business leaders to visit his country. In a conversation on Tuesday with Dina Powell McCormick, Vice Chairman of BDT & MSD Partners, Al-Falih touted the largest Gulf state as a source for financing in fields from artificial intelligence to sustainable energy.

“Globally leading VCs are flocking to the kingdom,” Al-Falih said, adding: “We’re also attracting global innovators to come to the kingdom to scale up their innovative companies and startups.”

Al-Falih, who also pitched Saudi Arabia’s futuristic Neom project and other mega-developments, didn’t stop at the kingdom’s borders, presenting the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council as a safe haven amid conflict across the Middle East.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC are actually leading the world and trying to find pragmatic implementable solutions to address the climate challenge and to create opportunities out of the energy transition,” Al-Falih said, pronouncing the Arabian Peninsula “ripe for benefiting foreign investors.” Later in the day, the Minister stopped by a party hosted by Invest Saudi, the kingdom’s foreign investment arm, held on the sidelines of Milken. 

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s new $100 billion investment fund Alat wants to win the trust of both U.S. tech and government leaders. Following up on the political terms that paved the way for Microsoft to invest $1.5 billion last month in Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence firm G42, Alat CEO Amit Midha said Saudi Arabia is willing to sell its China holdings if asked by Washington.

“So far the requests have been to keep manufacturing and supply chains completely separate, but if the partnerships with China would become a problem for the U.S., we will divest,” he told Bloomberg in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. Midha said Alat, which is focused on AI and semiconductors, will announce partnerships with two U.S. tech companies by the end of June, and will co-invest alongside a U.S. investment firm. He did not identify the companies.

Sarah Al Suhaimi, Chair of the Board of Saudi Tadawul Group, extended an invitation to Milken attendees to visit the kingdom and the region: “If you’re getting to know us from far away you will be mostly misguided,” she said.

Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, is preparing to launch a mental healthcare company in the U.S. Alaa Halawa, Mubadala’s Head of U.S. Ventures said on a panel at the Milken conference on Wednesday that the new firm will be geared toward young adults.

Oscar Fahlgren, Chief Investment Officer and Head of Brazil for Mubadala Capital, spoke about the fund’s confidence in the future of biofuels on a panel, days after he disclosed a planned $13.5 billion biofuel project in Brazil.

Khalfan Belhoul, CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, quipped on a Milken panel that “leaders are a Whatsapp away” in the UAE as he talked about agile policymaking in the GCC. The bloc needs to make it easier for startups to scale outside their home markets, he added.

Mohammed El-Kuwaiz, Chair of the Board of the Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia, addressed the Gulf’s growth story amid the energy transition. “We’re known as oil exporters, but our second biggest export is capital,”  El-Kuwaiz said on Monday, fielding questions from The Economist’s Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes.

“For the first time in our history we may be capital importers,” El-Kuwaiz said, as the kingdom looks to lure foreign capital to help fuel the $3 trillion of investment from now until 2030 for its economic diversification drive. The money is being poured into developing sectors like tourism, manufacturing and tech alongside mega-projects like NEOM. “The capital markets are an extremely important fulcrum,” he said.