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.

Initial stock offerings are proliferating across the Gulf. Spinneys supermarket chain is the latest UAE company to go public with its shares soaring as much as 11% on Thursday in its trading debut on the Dubai Financial Market.

Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul stock exchange, meanwhile, has more than 10 companies in its pipeline waiting to launch IPOs and another 50 that have applied for listings, CEO Mohammed Al-Rumaih told Bloomberg.

“The good thing about those IPOs is not just the number but the diversity,” he said. “They are from different sectors, different sizes in different stages in their life cycle.”

The kingdom’s Dr. Soliman Abdul Kader Fakeeh Hospital sold out its offering within an hour last week, raising more than $760 million and making it the largest Saudi IPO so far this year.

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 says 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 Milken 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.

From Dubai to Beverly Hills, the question occupying the world’s financial elite is this: when will the U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates?

Not till September at the earliest, says hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, who addressed the Milken Institute Annual Conference at The Beverly Hilton on Monday. Yie-Hsin Hung, CEO of State Street Global Advisors, sees rate cuts happening sooner: she predicted that the Fed will start to reduce rates as soon as July amid a more muted economy, speaking this morning at Day 2 of the Dubai FinTech Summit. 

The market-moving question is top of mind, but so too is the Gulf’s growth story amid the energy transition. “We’re known as oil exporters, but our second biggest export is capital,” Mohammed El-Kuwaiz, Chair of the Board of the Capital Market Authority of Saudi Arabia said at Milken 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 predicted, 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” at this time and why Saudi has opened up to the world and cracked into the top 10 capital markets, he said. El-Kuwaiz shared the stage with Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup; Harvey Schwartz, CEO of Carlyle; and Ron O’Hanley, Chair and CEO of State Street.

Back in Dubai, non-oil growth was top of the agenda for UAE Minister of Economy Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri. Speaking at the Dubai Fintech Summit, he repeated his belief in 7% annual GDP growth, but said that 4.9% non-oil growth is possible in 2024.

“We see growth away from traditional economies such as real estate and tourism to new types of tourism, such as sustainable tourism, health tech. We’re looking into AI, generative AI, the UAE is becoming the capital of AI,” he said.

Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, will distribute $31 billion in dividends despite a decline in first-quarter profit.

The payout is critical to the Saudi government, which owns 82% of the company and has reported a deficit for the sixth straight quarter.

The kingdom’s budget gap has forced a slowdown in the pace of building NEOM and other ambitious construction projects.

Aramco reported that first-quarter net income declined 14% to $27.3 billion, down from $31.9 billion a year earlier.

The company declared base dividend payouts for the first quarter totalling $20.3 billion and a performance-linked dividend distribution of $10.8 billion to be paid in the second quarter.

Saudi Arabia has pushed other oil producers to cut their output and keep oil prices high amid concerns about rising U.S. production creating surplus supply.

Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways has hired BNP Paribas and Morgan Stanley as bookrunners on the $1 billion IPO it’s planning by the end of 2024, Bloomberg reports.

ADQ, the sovereign wealth fund that owns Etihad, previously picked Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc and First Abu Dhabi Bank as lead advisers for the IPO, according to the news agency.

The IPO will create the first publicly traded major Gulf hub carrier as  Dubai-based rival Emirates also contemplates going public.

Etihad posted a five-fold increase in annual profit last year as it expanded to accommodate post-pandemic demand for international travel.

Fintech has long been a darling of the Dubai startup scene with over half of all finance-focused startups in the Gulf calling Dubai home.

The sector has shown some resilience amid the wider technology market correction, and it is against this backdrop that the Dubai International Financial Center is hosting its second annual summit startin Monday.

Some 8,000 investors, business executives, founders and regulators are expected at the event to discuss the latest innovations and challenges.

Driving conversations and deals over the two-day conference will be themes like financial inclusion — the region has more than 85 million “unbanked” adults — as well as business-friendly regulations in the UAE, emerging opportunities in green finance and cross-border cooperation.

The MENA region has 800 fintech startups valued at $15.5 billion, according to data by Dutch data platform Dealroom. 

Slated to attend are more than 20 governors of financial institutions including Essa Kazim, Governor of the DIFC; as well as Adena Friedman, Chair & CEO of Nasdaq Inc; Nic Dreckman, CEO of Bank Julius Baer; Yie-Hsin Hung, President & CEO of State Street Global Advisors; and Jim Demare, President Global Markets at Bank of America.

Local speakers include Abdullah bin Touq Al Marri, Cabinet Member and UAE Minister of Economy; H.E. Helal Saeed Al Marri, Director General, Department of Economy and Tourism, Dubai; Salem Humaid Al Marri, Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, UAE; and Faisal Belhoul, Vice Chairman of the Dubai Chamber.