The ‘Spy Sheikh’ Taking the AI World by Storm
Abu Dhabi’s Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan has more than $1.5 trillion to spend and he’s in a hurry; grappling with Mark Zuckerberg
The Abu Dhabi royal sometimes called “the spy sheikh” is accustomed to using his vast wealth to master his many obsessions, which have ranged over the years from martial arts to chess to videogames.
Now Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser and brother of the president, is deploying a similar playbook at a much grander scale. He wants to muscle his tiny emirate to the front of the race to develop and control AI systems that could transform the global economy.
The world is taking notice. The CEOs of Apple, Microsoft and BlackRock have all paid homage at his elaborate Persian Gulf royal compound in recent months. On a fall trip to the U.S., he grappled with fellow Brazilian jujitsu devotee Mark Zuckerberg, and donned a sweatshirt and jeans for a visit with Elon Musk at Tesla’s Texas factory.
All of this is possible in part because the 56-year-old Tahnoon controls more money than almost anyone on the planet, as the chairman of two Abu Dhabi wealth funds with an estimated $1.4 trillion in assets and the steward of an enormous personal fortune.
A new artificial intelligence fund he leads, MGX, is set to be infused with more than $50 billion from his wealth and other Abu Dhabi sources, according to people familiar with the fund. Billions of dollars more are set to be spent on AI by Group 42, a company he controls.
Tahnoon’s entities are part of the more than $70 billion the U.A.E. pledged to invest in France and Italy earlier this month. Last month, MGX was one of the few names mentioned backing Stargate, a $100 billion data center project announced at the White House to be led by SoftBank and OpenAI. It also has written big checks for OpenAI, Musk’s XAI and Amazon-backed Anthropic.
Even in an AI world awash in funds, Tahnoon stands out. While many are plunging tens of billions of dollars into concentrated areas—SoftBank is making a huge bet on OpenAI and the tech giants are heaving money at data centers—Tahnoon is planning to spread more money broadly around the fledgling sector than almost anyone else.
It is a risky time to be splashing so much cash on AI.
The low-cost AI model from China’s DeepSeek has abruptly shaken assumptions on the need for heavy investment. Valuations across tech have skyrocketed, and even optimistic venture capitalists often acknowledge the market is in a searing frenzy. Leading AI companies expect to lose billions of dollars for years to come, while pledges of future profitability rest on hazy assumptions of a tidal wave of demand.
Many see parallels to the late-stage dot-com bubble, when the cash-splashers of the era plunged tens of billions of dollars into building out fiber-optic cable networks based on projections that internet growth would be even more rapid than it was. A glut of fiber and enormous losses followed.
Tahnoon isn’t deterred.
His strategy is to use his cash and influence not only to enable the U.A.E. and Abu Dhabi to profit from the rise of AI, but to make the U.A.E. a global hub for the technology. Seeing enormous global demand for years to come, his vision is that chip plants, data centers and local AI companies will build a post-oil economic future for the tiny-but-powerful emirate a 90 minute drive from Dubai—and for the country overall.
From his ornate palace in Abu Dhabi, Tahnoon personally tracks the progress of global large language models on a dashboard his researchers built for him on his phone and computer. He urges subordinates at the giant network of companies he owns to rapidly incorporate AI.
Tahnoon has “the capital to invest in what is a very capital-intensive endeavor,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, who has worked extensively with the sheikh since 2023.
During one meeting with Tahnoon, he and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned a book by George Washington University professor Jeffrey Ding that suggests AI could be the base of coming global economic growth.
The sheikh scribbled it down on his notepad, and soon after, Ding was eating lunch in his Washington, D.C., office when a representative from the U.A.E. embassy knocked on his door and said, “I cannot find your book in any bookstore. Can I get two copies?” Smith recalled.
A $1 trillion consolation prize
Tahnoon grew up in the shadow of his brother Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the longtime crown prince who was named president of the U.A.E. in 2022.
While his brother rubbed shoulders with foreign leaders and crafted plans to remake Abu Dhabi’s economy, Tahnoon honed extracurricular activities.
He became so hooked on competing with his brothers in “Age of Empires,” a videogame where players develop hunter gatherers into powerful civilizations, that he hired an employee from the company that makes the game to coach him on tactics, former employees said.
He turned a palace within his royal compound into a gym. He funds one of the world’s top cycling teams—UAE Team Emirates—and he rides on an island near the presidential palace he ringed with cycling paths. He liked super-light Colnago bikes so much that he instructed one of his companies to buy the Italian firm that makes them.
Tahnoon has poured money into building up Brazilian jiu jitsu and other forms of grappling around the globe. A black belt, he started a well-funded championship tournament that has “become the Olympics of our sport,” said Bobby Razak, a filmmaker who is making a documentary on Tahnoon and the event.
“He’s definitely one of the Founding Fathers of mixed martial arts,” he said, a sport that “would not be where it was today” without Tahnoon.
The interest in AI has roots in the early 2000s, when he was so intrigued by computer-aided chess that he hired a sizable team of engineers to make him a program named Hydra that could compete with the world’s best players. Erdogan Günes, a computer chess specialist for opening moves, said he often talked by phone for two or more hours a day with the sheikh as they monitored Hydra’s games.
In late 2017, Tahnoon’s interest increased after he learned that Google’s AI program AlphaZero had beaten the world’s best computer chess program after needing just four hours to learn the rules. It was far more powerful than Hydra ever was—opening his eyes to the power of AI, he told associates.
The following year, he tapped Peng Xiao, the former chief technology officer at software-turned-Bitcoin firm MicroStrategy, to start G42, a company devoted to applications of AI.
At the time, Abu Dhabi’s wealth and economic strategy were largely under the control of Tahnoon’s brother, Mohamed. As de facto leader of the country, he pushed to siphon off part of the emirate’s oil wealth and put it into investments and economic development, building the wealth fund bounty Tahnoon would later inherit.
Mohamed had long viewed the tech sector as a big piece of that puzzle, and in 2017 made a push into AI, launching a national strategy for the technology to make the U.A.E. “the world leader in AI” by 2031. (It was later changed to “a” world leader).
After Mohamed became the UAE’s president, there was speculation that Tahnoon would be named crown prince. Instead, Mohamed gave the role to his own son and awarded Tahnoon an apparent consolation prize: oversight of two sovereign funds, enthroning him as the main custodian of Abu Dhabi’s wealth.
Taken with his own business empire—a sprawling collection of real estate, maritime, banking and food assets, many with government ties—that gave Tahnoon control over more than $1.5 trillion as of last year, according to data firm Global SWF.
Western business leaders were enamored with the sheikh.
Microsoft’s Smith first met Tahnoon in March 2023 on a business trip to Abu Dhabi, where they struck up a conversation about AI and energy. Tahnoon has also developed a rapport with OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Early last year, the two men discussed a since-abandoned plan to finance a global network of chip factories to be built by TSMC.
lackRock CEO Larry Fink says he frequently visits the U.A.E. and talks to Tahnoon about technology, health, longevity—another obsession of the sheikh’s—and AI.
Abu Dhabi “has a position of influence way beyond the size of the population,” said Fink, whose firm is partnering with a Tahnoon-led entity to invest in AI infrastructure. “He believes they have a unique advantage in AI.”
“You have to choose”
After the AI frenzy took off in 2023, Tahnoon’s ambitions ran into thorny geopolitics.
As national security adviser, he has long attracted criticism for overseeing the UAE’s vast spying operation. Due to an eye condition, he is almost always photographed indoors in sunglasses, adding to the aura of intrigue around him.
Security analysts have warned G42 subsidiaries have been involved in surveillance of Emirati residents and dissidents; U.S. officials alleged a popular messaging app it owned collected user information like location and contacts, and had the ability to listen to calls.
The ties of both Tahnoon and the U.A.E. to China have frustrated U.S. national security hawks. Tahnoon’s CEO of G42, Xiao, was previously a Chinese citizen, and the company relied on Chinese-made equipment from Huawei routers and owned stakes in Chinese startups.
So when Tahnoon wanted G42 to buy cutting-edge U.S. AI tech, members of the Biden administration told him in a 2023 Washington, D.C., visit they wanted the investment, but he couldn’t straddle both sides of the China-U.S. divide if he wanted the U.S. to approve.
“You have to choose,” Gina Raimondo, the former Secretary of Commerce said she told the sheikh in a blunt message. “This is a one-strike-and-you’re-out kind of policy.”
The U.A.E. has long seen itself as something of a Switzerland—a trusted point of trade for East and West—and choosing sides on AI would risk damaging relations with China. But the allure of the U.S. lead on AI was too much to ignore.
Tahnoon picked the U.S.
Huawei routers were ripped out of G42’s offices and Western equipment put in its place, while Tahnoon and his aides continued negotiating with the administration on details.
To enable a deal, the administration paired Tahnoon’s company with Microsoft. G42 agreed to use Microsoft’s cloud for AI work and also to comply with U.S. export restrictions as a part of the deal, and Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, joining its board of directors.
Still, China hawks in Congress remained concerned that the UAE’s overall ties to China remain strong, fearing the country could allow the powerful U.S. tech tools to make their way to China. Those lawmakers could be an obstacle if Tahnoon comes back for similar deals.
The country has ambitions to host massive data centers that run Western large language models. Semiconductor manufacturing could follow, as government officials have had discussions with TSMC and Samsung about building chip fabrication plants in Abu Dhabi, people familiar with the discussions said. The emirate is planning a surge of gas-power plant construction to meet potential data-center demand, and it is considering expanding its new nuclear plant.
“We definitely would like the U.S. government to give us more green lights,” Xiao said, adding U.S. companies are ready to do deals with G42.
Officials are trying to build up local AI companies involved in healthcare and energy into major forces, and to lure foreign companies’ AI jobs to the region. While Silicon Valley has a stranglehold on top talent, the idea is that Abu Dhabi could emerge as a hub for AI companies serving the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.
Many practical obstacles beckon. There’s no obvious link between building data centers—scant generators of employment, often located in remote locations—and sparking a rush of AI software jobs nearby. A long list of cities with far more engineering talent are also eager to become AI hubs themselves, such as London and Paris.
Abu Dhabi also faces geopolitical challenges similar to the Microsoft deal. The U.A.E. would need U.S. clearance to buy far more chips—as well as for chip building equipment if it wants to host semiconductor fabrication plants.
The Trump administration hasn’t yet weighed in on the topic, but MGX is spreading money across top companies in the U.S. AI sector. Ahmed Yahia, MGX’s CEO, said the company plans to spend 70% to 80% of its money in the U.S.
Meanwhile, Tahnoon is sowing seeds with those in the president’s orbit. MGX took part in a $6 billion fundraise by xAI late last year. Tahnoon’s asset manager Lunate recently participated in a $1.5 billion additional investment in Affinity, the investment fund run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom Tahnoon met in the first Trump administration.
Speaking to a podcast in December, Kushner recalled a 2018 meeting when he was visiting the region. Tahnoon told him, “Jared, I’m not meeting with you unless you spend two hours after with me to talk about AI.”
