G42 studies selling a majority stake to secure chips and Homayun moves toward a dual listing, marking structural shifts in sovereign AI

AI efforts in the region have moved from the launch-announcement stage to the stage of resolving complex structural questions about ownership, financing and listing. Our editorial tracking notes synchronized moves in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha and Cairo, reflecting a broad repositioning of sovereign entities in the face of global supply-chain challenges and advanced-equipment export controls.

Ownership options in Abu Dhabi are directly linked to securing the flow of advanced processors.Group “G42” has held exploratory talks to sell a majority stake to U.S. investors, a step aimed at reshaping the group’s ownership structure to ensure continued access to Nvidia and AMD processors. The company can currently purchase advanced chips without a U.S. export licence until about April 2027, and the options on the table range from bringing in an American firm as majority owner to creating an entirely new entity subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The current ownership table includes a minority stake and a board seat for Microsoft, alongside Silver Lake and Mubadala, while no final agreement on the future structure has been settled.

Conversely, Saudi Arabia is progressing with new financing and procedural arrangements through “Homayun”, wholly owned by the Public Investment Fund. Chief Executive Officer Tarek Amin is leading efforts to build a team with expertise in investor relations and public offering preparation, targeting a dual listing in Riyadh and New York by 2029. Homayun is simultaneously raising a dedicated fund of $2.5 billion to build data centers in the kingdom, a clear sign of Riyadh’s desire to involve external capital in bearing infrastructure costs while curbing direct financial outlays. The fourth Global AI Summit organized by “SDAIA” in Riyadh, under the patronage of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from September 15 to 17, serves as the first platform to showcase investment trends and official policies following these developments.

These moves dovetail with a unprecedented financial concentration in the Abu Dhabi Global Market, where the financial free zone announced that its licensed entities manage AI-specific capital exceeding $100 billion, led by “MGX” which closed its first fund in July at $49 billion. MGX had participated in the “Anthropic” round of $65 billion and presented a consortium to acquire “Alind Data Centers” for roughly $40 billion. In Qatar, Qatar Investment Authority, through its arm “QAI”, expanded its hardware-layer bet by joining a financing round of $875 million for “Buzitrone AI”, a specialist in inference hardware, raising its valuation to $5 billion after its initial bet in the previous February round. In Egypt, officials of the IT Industry Development Authority “ITIDA” and the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority met with representatives of “Hikadata” to localize data-center investments, completing national projects that include the “KernK” model and a partnership between “Vodafone Business” and “Kasafa Technologies” to build the first sovereign AI factory.

Changing computing rules imposes new operational calculations on decision-makers in the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant.Technical sovereignty is no longer merely a local political decision; it is now tied to geopolitical equations that make access to advanced chips contingent on accepting international ownership structures or direct U.S. regulatory oversight. Moreover, the sovereign entities’ move toward involving investors, establishing specialist data-center funds and preparing public offerings means that pricing margins for inference services and local cloud computing will be driven by commercial and investment returns rather than perpetual direct government support. Institutions and technical teams in the region must grasp this shift in the cost of accessing advanced models and align digital-transformation plans with the emerging infrastructure map linking Gulf computing hubs and localization efforts in Egypt.