Having disrupted the athletic world with billions poured into golf, tennis, mixed martial arts and esports, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is diving deeper into soccer.

SURJ Sports, an investment arm of the sovereign wealth fund, signed an agreement on Tuesday to form a joint venture with the upstart Kings League.

The move brings a wildly popular new brand of football to the kingdom that features seven players on each side of the field. 

An inaugural event is planned for November, which will be streamed on a range of platforms including TikTok and YouTube. The league has close to 30 million social media followers.

Kings League was founded in 2022 by former Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué and has a growing young audience drawn by its fast-paced format.

Most of the league’s revenue comes from sponsorship and merchandising, rather than broadcasting, which fuels traditional football teams that play with 11 to a side. 

“Our priority today is to maximize reach and get in front of as many fans as possible,” Kings League CEO Djamel Agaoua tells Bloomberg.

“In the future, as the product matures, we want to develop our media rights revenue stream, and we might consider more exclusive deals with broadcasters and streaming platforms,” he said.

Dubai Holding’s $584 million residential real estate investment trust jumped 10% on its trading debut today, reflecting the strength of the emirate’s property market in the city’s first IPO of the year.

The listing on the Dubai Financial Market, which was oversubscribed last week within minutes of its launch, values the trust at approximately $3.9 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Backed by the investment arm of Dubai’s ruling family, the Dubai Residential REIT offering was managed by Citigroup Global Markets Limited, Emirates NBD Capital and Morgan Stanley.

Dubai’s residential market continues to rally, buoyed by the inflow of wealthy expatriates drawn by relaxed visa policies and low taxation.

Abu Dhabi National Energy Co., the UAE capital’s omnipresent power and water utility known as TAQA, may be getting ready for a shopping spree in the U.S.

The government-owned company, whose largest shareholder is sovereign wealth fund ADQ, will focus its current plans for international expansion in the American arena, CEO Jasim Hussain Thabet tells Reuters.

“The U.S. is a key market for us,” Thabet said. “If the right opportunity presents itself for TAQA, we would be pursuing that.”

Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology as well as CEO of the national oil company ADNOC, told President Donald Trump during his visit two weeks ago that the government plans to boost energy investments in the U.S. over the next decade to $440 billion.

TAQA, which raised $1.8 billion from a bond sale last October, would generally prefer to acquire a fully integrated company with generation, networks and “a pipeline of growth,” Thabet said.

The company’s Masdar unit last year acquired a 50% stake in U.S. renewable energy firm Terra-Gen.

Two months of record-breaking temperatures in the UAE have seen residents and visitors sweltering through what is normally the cooler events season, with little relief on the way as the Eid al-Adha holiday approaches next week.

Summer does not officially begin until June 21, but some inland areas are already registering record temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), prompting the National Center of Meteorology to warn the public to take precautions in the extreme heat.

April was already the warmest on record in the UAE, with an average high of 42.6 degrees Celsius. “The new thing about these conditions is that they are happening really too early, before even the official start of the summer season,” Khalifa University’s head of the Environmental and Geophysical Sciences Dr. Diana Francis told The National.

“The second element is how extreme they are compared to the record,” she said.

Egypt is aiming to link its expanding railway network with Asia and Europe, but it hasn’t yet been able to finalize plans to build a bridge to Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, it will use ships to bring cargo across the Red Sea, Reuters reports. Saudi’s King Salman first announced the bridge project in 2016, envisioning a road that would cross the Straits of Tiran to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

If completed, the route would compete with another notional rail project that would connect the UAE to Israel’s Haifa Port through Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Another project on the drawing board would run north from the Gulf through Iraq.

First came Disney. Now the Waldorf is finding a home on Abu Dhabi’s fun-filled Yas Island with 133 luxury apartments being built by top UAE developer Aldar bearing the luxury hotel chain’s brand.

It was a matter of hours after Aldar launched sales of the project on Sunday that every one of the units at the Waldorf Astoria Residences Yas was snatched up – from garden apartments to penthouses – generating more than $230 million in sales, The National reports.

The success of Abu Dhabi’s first branded residence sale comes barely two weeks after Disney and the UAE’s Miral Group announced construction of the U.S. entertainment giant’s first theme park in the Middle East. Disney’s $10 billion outpost on Yas Island is expected to open sometime between 2030 and 2033.

Yas is already home to Abu Dhabi’s Formula One track, Etihad Stadium, Ferrari World, the Warner Brothers theme park, Sea World Abu Dhabi and Yas Waterworld, spread among a dozen or so five-star hotels.

Aldar said expatriates and international investors accounted for 76% of the Waldorf buyers, with the rest bought by UAE citizens. Customers from the U.K. and China led the charge.

“The sell-out of Waldorf Astoria Residences Yas marks a significant milestone for Aldar and highlights the attractiveness of Yas Island both as an investment destination and prime residential address,” Aldar CEO Jonathan Emery said.

G42, the UAE’s flagship artificial intelligence company, took a big step in its bid to establish regional leadership in the booming field.

The Abu Dhabi-backed tech company, whose Chairman is National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, announced a partnership with OpenAI on Thursday to build an AI data center with a 1-gigawatt capacity that would make it one of the most powerful facilities in the world.

Among other investors in the Abu Dhabi data center called Stargate UAE – OpenAI’s first major project outside the U.S. – are Oracle, SoftBank, Nvidia, and Cisco.

G42 and OpenAI didn’t disclose a cost for the Abu Dhabi project, although similar projects planned in the U.S. run well over $10 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. It said the data-center project is the fruit of months of negotiations between the UAE and the Trump administration that culminated in a deal last week to allow the U.A.E. to import up to 500,000 advanced AI chips a year.

Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, meanwhile, is planning next week’s graduation ceremony, where 104 students from 24 countries will get their degrees, including the six-year-old school’s first Emirati PhD graduate.

MBZUAI’s President Eric Xing told Bloomberg in an interview published today that he hopes to make his school the Stanford of the Gulf, pointing to the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship it cultivates, and its global influence.

The $1.1 billion IPO for Saudi Arabia’s Flynas low-cost airline has reached the runway and is ready for take-off after the offering to institutional investors was nearly 100 times oversubscribed.

The carrier, whose largest shareholders are Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holdings and the government’s Public Investment Fund, is the latest in a slew of IPOs for Saudi companies that have also encountered high demand, including Umm Al-Qura construction, which raised more than $500 million in March.

Flynas shares, which will start trading on Riyadh’s Tadawul Stock Exchange May 28, were set on Wednesday at 80 riyals apiece, the top of the range given by the IPO’s investment bankers.

Proceeds from the offering are slated for expanding Flynas’ fleet by 225 planes and launching several new flight hubs. The budget airline flies to 59 destinations and is popular with Muslim pilgrims to Mecca and expat workers from India, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Flynas is not alone among Gulf airlines interested in going public. Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways, owned by the ADQ sovereign wealth fund, is actively preparing for an IPO while Emirates and Qatar Airways have been mulling share sales for years.

Still waiting to stretch its wings is Riyadh Air, Saudi Arabia’s new national carrier wholly owned by the PIF, which plans to start flying its stylish royal blue jetliners this year in the fourth quarter.