A 44-year-old Abu Dhabi family conglomerate is looking to bankroll Hollywood blockbusters to secure its future fortunes as the UAE capital establishes itself as a hub for content creation and big-budget productions.

United Al Saqer Group, founded by members of the Abu Dhabi royal family, has invested $200 million in The DNEG Group, valuing the British-Indian firm at more than $2 billion.

DNEG – known for special effects work on films like “Dune,” Oppenheimer” and “Interstellar” – said the cash injection will be used to open a new office and “visual experience hub” in Abu Dhabi, “with plans to develop a world-class ecosystem in the Middle East for content production, storage and distribution.”

The funds will also help scale its technology division, Brahma, which is developing an AI-powered, photo-real CGI creator. 

The investment is the latest example of the Gulf’s evolution as a source of capital. In recent years, investment activity, largely led by the sovereign wealth funds, has become more active and strategic while at the same time coming with strings attached to bring firms with Gulf backing to do business locally here in the region – helping to reach targets on job creation and economic diversification away from oil. 

United Al Saqer has for decades poured money into traditional sectors that propelled the wave of economic development after oil was first discovered like construction, restaurants and car sales.

The group’s subsidiaries build mosques, hospitals and grocery stores across the region. They also sell the majority of commercial vehicles on the UAE’s roads and most of the BMWs purchased in Abu Dhabi.

The group’s foray into modern filmmaking is in step with another recent move: a research endowment it made to Abu Dhabi’s artificial intelligence university late last year to develop AI applications in digital health. 

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.

As Dubai breaks ground this week on its own financial hub expansion, Abu Dhabi too is bursting at the seams to accommodate the financial firms flocking to the UAE capital, Bloomberg reports.

For several years Abu Dhabi Global Market on Al Maryah Island struggled to attract tenants and its four towers were largely unoccupied.

But recent efforts to attract global players in finance have brought the campus to near-capacity.

The government is now looking to bridge the free zone with next-door neighbor Al Reem Island, a move, first announced in April 2023, that will give it 10 times as much space and make it one of the largest financial districts in the world, occupying 3,558 acres. 

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund swung into the black in 2023, recording revenues of SR 331 billion ($88.3 billion) and more than doubling earnings growth from 2022, according to an audit by KPMG.

The fund is also nearing the trillion-dollar mark in assets under management, surging 28% to $986 billion last year.

The PIF, the most active state-backed investor in the world, has been fueled by surging public equities; the receipt of a transfer of 4% of Aramco shares; a turnaround in fortunes at Softbank, which in previous years has been the source of losses; and a flurry of acquisitions including in technology and energy diversification.

The fund recorded a profit of SR 64 billion ($17 billion) compared to a loss of SR 17 billion ($4.5 billion) in the previous year.

The national purse is the foundation of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic diversification strategy, relied upon to drive tens of billions of dollars in investments to develop nascent sectors like tourism, technology and manufacturing in the kingdom. 

Egypt emerged from its weekend huddle with the European Union holding signed agreements for billions of dollars in business deals ranging from construction projects to renewable energy.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the Egypt-EU Investment Conference outside Cairo on Saturday that deals potentially worth over 40 billion euros ($43 billion) were being negotiated with Egyptian partners.

Among them were agreements on four green ammonia projects including an $11 billion deal with Frankfurt-based DAI Infrastruktur.

The Sovereign Fund of Egypt also signed a deal with BP, UAE’s Masdar, Egyptian infrastructure company Hassan Allam Utilities and Infinity Power to invest in a green ammonia plant in Ain Sukhna Port on the western coast of the Gulf of Suez.

EU officials said they would move ahead with plans to invest up to 1 billion euros  in the Egyptian economy, the first tranche of a 7.4 billion-euro European aid package agreed upon in March.  

From Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea resorts to Dubai’s neighborhood mosques, the season’s searing temperatures are forcing nations across the Middle East to reevaluate the impact climate change could have on their people and economies.

Following the deaths of more than 1,300 pilgrims who made the hajj this month to Mecca, authorities across the region are taking steps to protect worshippers from heat that often exceeds 50 Celsius (122 F).

In the UAE, mosques have been instructed to limit their Friday sermons and prayers to no more than 10 minutes because of the scorching sun.

The New York Times published a story on Thursday suggesting that global warming could undermine some of the ambitious tourism, sports and industrial projects now underway across the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia’s Neom mega-development and the string of luxury hotels under construction on the shores of the Red Sea.

In North Africa, the unrelenting dry weather has depressed harvests of fruit for export while requiring Morocco to spend record sums on wheat imports, Bloomberg reports.

Saudi Arabia is offering 90-day e-visas to Esports World Cup ticket holders as it gears up to host the debut competition that aims to put the kingdom on the international gaming map.

Boulevard Riyadh City is the venue where more than 2,500 players will compete for a $60 million prize pool, the largest in esports history, from July 4 to Aug. 25.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, himself a “Call of Duty” fan, has earmarked $38 billion from the Public Investment Fund – with the aim of attracting 250 gaming companies and studios to set up shop in the country while creating 39,000 video game-related jobs.

The homegrown strategy builds on the kingdom’s credentials in the e-arena with investments in the biggest players like Tencent, Nintendo, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft.

In March, Saudi Arabia’s National Development Fund and the Social Development Bank announced the establishment of two venture capital funds with a combined value of $120 million to back new esports companies in the kingdom.

Buttressed by more than $42 billion in property deals and loans since February, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi will be pulling out all the stops this weekend when he hosts a business summit catering to European leaders and investors.

At the peak of Egypt’s two-year financial crisis, trade with member-states of the European Union in 2023 slid 19% from the previous year – a benchmark El-Sisi will seek to reverse during the two-day Egypt-EU Investment Conference that starts on Saturday. As exports to Europe plunged almost 32% last year, Italy, Spain and Greece were the top European importers of Egyptian goods.

Joining the Egyptian President, cabinet members and Cairo business leaders at the Al Manara International Conference Centre will be European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, along with government officials and investors from across the continent.

Egypt, coaxed by the International Monetary Fund, has embarked on a path of economic reform that includes divestment of billions in government assets and devaluation of the pound while implementing a fixed exchange rate. In turn the IMF and World Bank are arranging $8.7 billion in loans to help put the economy on course.

A breakthrough $35 billion property deal captured the attention of world investors in February as Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ led a group that bought development rights to Egypt’s Mediterranean coastal headland of Ras El-Hekma – soon to be dotted with luxury beach resorts.