Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani made global business news headlines on Tuesday by pledging a $20 billion investment in the US data centre industry.
The announcement, made alongside US President-elect, Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home represented one of the most sizable investments to date and industry experts in the UAE say it sends a resounding signal to the market about the viability of the data centre industry, driven by AI and the UAE's increasingly central role within it.
"This investment solidifies the UAE's position as a leading player in the global data centre and AI ecosystem," Mohammed Yousef, Founder & CEO of Excenology, an ERP and CRM solutions provider based in Dubai, told Aletihad.
"It could create opportunities for UAE-based companies to collaborate on global AI initiatives, boosting the country's reputation for fostering a vibrant tech ecosystem, and further reinforces the UAE's image as a forward-thinking nation committed to technology-driven growth."
Sajwani, who made his fortune as the head of Dubai developer DAMAC Properties, is a long-time ally of Trump. DAMAC owns the Middle East's only Trump-branded golf course in Dubai and has completed multiple developments with the Trump family business.
In 2024, at a keynote speech held at the Bitcoin Mena conference in Abu Dhabi, Trump's son, Eric lauded the growing relationship between the property developer and his family.
"We've done great property with DAMAC, you can't look out a hotel window in Dubai without seeing a DAMAC sign. They'd be great partners. I'm doing a big hotel in Dubai as we speak," Eric said back in December.
The latest investment deal, in which Sajwani said said was four years in the making, seemingly in anticipation of Trump's re-election, is a major move that the president will look to leverage in order to achieve his economic ambitions.
Although questions remain over the intricacies of the enormous deal and whether it will be finalised, Dmitriy Kalyada, an AI expert who started his UAE career at Abu Dhabi's G42 and has since founded generative AI company Allessent, said the market would gain confidence from the announcement.
"For this region, gold and real estate was always the traditional way that we would see 'old money' invested," Kalyada told Aletihad.
"So, from an institutional investment perspective, to see a property developer like DAMAC invest in digital technologies, it's a signal for market players and a big validation of the industry."
Kalyada said he believed the investment had the potential to encourage other investors, from more traditional industries like property development, into investing in digital technology that formed the bedrock of emerging industries including AI and digital currencies.
He believes that investments of this sort would help put the UAE at the centre of the global tech race and gain favour with incoming administrations.
"This can have a positive impact internally, it will come back not only as money, but it will also come back as access, to GPUs (graphics processing units) and technology," he said.
The deal is set to be financed through Edgnex Data Centers a DAMAC-owned company specialising in data centres and will flow into Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana in its first phase, if plans go ahead.
